“See, ye Ladies that are coy,What the mighty Love can do!”
“See, ye Ladies that are coy,What the mighty Love can do!”
Then we had tea (the cake in a silver basket on a fringed mat, if you please!), and after we had talked a little more, we said good-bye, and Peter took us out. He had rushed out of the room just five minutes before, when the first symptoms of leave-taking manifested themselves, and we saw why, when we passed out through the first room where the gramophone was. It played us out with “The Wedding March,” surely a graceful thought of Peter Ball’s!
“He’s very nice, but what a pity he hasn’t got taste!” I said as we came away. You see, I am used to Cinque Cento House, and I have always been told that there is only one taste, and that ours is it.
“Taste!” Christina mooned, as we got into a ’bus. “There’s so much of it about, isn’t there? On my word, it will soon be quitechicto be vulgar.”
It was not difficult to tell which way the wind was blowing after that. It was about this time that Mr. Aix found Christina typing her own name and Peter’s on a sheet of III Imperial. He hadn’t even set eyes on Peter Ball then, but he did a few days later, when Peter Ball came to tea, holding his grey kid gloves in his hand. George, luckily, was out again, really out, not pretending to be in his study, and Mr. Aix it was who opened the front-door for Peter when he went away at seven.
“A man!” he said, when he came back to us all in the winter garden, and Christina was just going out—escaping to her own room to think over Peter Ball, I dare say—and she said as she passed him—
“I could hug you for saying that, Mr. Aix.”
“No, you couldn’t,” said he. “I am popularly supposed to be repellent. A lady said I was like a white stick of celery grown in a dark cellar. Another, of music-hall celebrity, compared me to a blasted pipe-stem. I do not look for success with your sex. It was kind of you to think of it, though.”
Peter Ball meant business, or else we could not have all spoken of it so openly. George was awfully cross at the idea of having to find a new secretary. Lady Scilly said she thought he could do better thanChristina, who was too forward (and too pretty). She tried very hard to flirt with Peter herself, but perhaps Peter thoughthecould do better, and wouldn’t. She looked into his face and said, “You great big beauty!” She told him “high” stories, as Christina and I call them, and he wouldn’t laugh. She asked him right out why he wouldn’t, and he answered equally right out, “Because I disapprove of all jesting with regard to the relations of the sexes!”
Lady Scilly looked disgusted, and left him severely alone, as he meant her to.
For weeks after this he was like a full pail of water one is afraid to carry without spilling. At last he slopped over, and asked Christina to be his wife. I wasn’t in the room, of course, but Christina was nice and told us afterwards. He went on his knees, she says, and I believe her, because I found a cushion on the floor immediately after, before the housemaid had tidied the room, and I think he had managed to put it under his knees without her seeing. Our floor is bony.
“The very moment,” she said, “he had got me to say yes, he jumped up and rushed out without his hat, to send a telegram to his mother with the good news!”
She thought this so nice of him and so flattering, as showing that he hadn’t made quite sure of her. For though we all knew she meant to take him, he was not supposed to be aware of it. Considering that Christina is grown up, she ought to be able tomake a man think exactly what she wishes him to think about her. Such power comes, or should come, with advancing years, and is one of its compensations. Ariadne, of course, isn’t old enough to have left off being quite transparent, and regrets it deeply in some of her poetry.
Christina was married to Peter Ball almost directly, and Ariadne and I were her bridesmaids. Mrs. Mander gave us our dresses and hats. They were quite fashionable; she would have no nonsense or necklaces. Ariadne looked smart and like other people, for once. She didn’t look so pretty, but it is a mistake to want to go about the streets looking like a picture. Prettiness isn’t everything, and the really smartest people would disdain to look simply ready for an artist to paint them.
Simon Hermyre, Lady Scilly’s best friend, was Peter Ball’s best man. He had met Ariadne at the Scillys’, but at Christina’s wedding he said that he should not have known her again. He began to take some notice of her. She at once asked him to call, and it was a great mistake, for he never did. It is awkward for Ariadne, I admit, for Mother not going out, and George being perfectly useless as a father, she has to do all her own asking.
That can’t be helped, but Ariadne is always hasty and strikes while the iron is too hot. Simon Hermyre didratherlike her, but he wasn’t quite sure that he actually wanted to take her on, and all that that means—and whether he liked her enough to risk making Lady Scilly angry about it, as of course shewould be. At all events he didn’t come—his chief kept him in till six o’clock every day, or some excuse of that sort. As if a man couldn’t always manage a call if he wanted to, even if he were third secretary to some one in the planet Mars!
WEnever used to go away for more than a week every summer to Brighton or Herne Bay, but now that we live in the heart of the town, as of course St. John’s Wood is, it has been decided that we want a whole month at the sea. This year Mother and Aunt Gerty chose Whitby in Yorkshire. It is convenient for Aunt Gerty—something about a company that she is thinking of joining in the autumn. George didn’t care where we went, as he isn’t to be with us. He just forks out the money as Mother asks for it; he trusts her implicitly not to waste it, and to do things as cheap as they can be done and yet decently, because after all wearehis family, and everybody knows that now.
I sometimes think he would come with us himself, if Aunt Gerty wasn’t so much about.
Ariadne and Aunt Gerty haven’t got an ounce of country fibre in them. They get at loggerheads with the country at once. The mildest cows chase them, they manage to nearly drown themselves in the tiniest ditches, the quietest old pony rears if they drive him. If they pick a mushroom it is sure to be a toadstool; if they bite into a pear there’s a waspinside it; if they take hold of a village baby they are sure to drop it. They haven’t country good manners, they leave gates open, they trample down grass, they entice dogs away, they startle geese and set hens running, and offend everybody all round.
So they weren’t particularly happy in the first rooms we took, at a farm just out of Whitby. There was one stuffy little best parlour, sealed up like a bottle of medecine, and one mouldy geranium looking as if it couldn’t help it on the window-sill, and the “Seven Deadly Sins” in chromo on the walls, and Rebecca at a well of Berlin wools over the mantelpiece. They covered the family Bible with an antimacassar, and Aunt Gerty’s theatrical photos without which she never travels, and suppressed the frosty ornament in a glass case of one of Mrs. Wilson’s wedding-cakes. Mrs. Wilson married early, she says, and I say she married often, for there are three of them! Itwasuncomfortable. Mother didn’t complain, Aunt Gerty did. She had nowhere to hang up her dresses; they were all getting spoilt; she couldn’t see to do her hair in the wretched little scrap of looking-glass, and the room was so small that she twice set fire to her bed-curtains, curling her hair, which she did twenty times a day, for there was always wind or rain or something. The walls were so thin that she could hear every word Mr. and Mrs. Wilson said to each other in the next room, quarrelling and arranging the bill and so on. She couldn’t sleep with the window shut, and all sorts of horrid buggy things came in if you left it open.It was so dreadfully lonely here, and she had never “seen so much land” in her life.
Aunt Gerty has been on tour often enough to get used to uncomfortable lodgings, lodgings not chosen by herself, very likely, and her luggage all fetched away the day before she leaves by the baggage man! But it is in a town, and that makes all the difference. Give her a strip of mirror in the door of her wardrobe, and a gas-jet ready to set fire to her window-curtains, and a row of shops outside to cheer her up, and she won’t think of grumbling.
The landlady didn’t consider us a particularly good “let.” I used to hear her in bed in the mornings explaining to Mr. Wilson, who is a railway porter, how glad she would be to be “shot” of us if it wasn’t for the money. “Ay, lass!” he would answer, and then I used to hear him turning over in bed and going to sleep again.
“They’re better to keep a week than a fortnight!” she used to say. “What with their late dinners and breakfasts in bed, and their black coffee, and all sitting down for an hour o’ mornings polishing up them ondacent brown boots—they darsen’t trust the help, no, not since she went and rubbed them with lard—poor girl, she meant well,—and she fit to rive her legs off answering the parlour bell every minute! Well, the sooner I see their backs, the better pleased I shall be!”
We took the hint and gave up the rooms, and got some nicer ones in town on the quay. Aunt Gerty left off bothering Mother to have late dinner andstrong coffee, and we lived on herrings and cream cheeses, the cheapest things in Whitby. I mean the herrings. When they have a good catch, they sell them at a halfpenny each on the quay-side, or slap their children with them, or shy them at strangers. Anything to keep the market up!
Mrs. Bennison, our new landlady, isn’t a Whitby woman, but her husband is, and owns a boat, and takes Ben out sailing, and tries to make a man of him. We hardly ever see him, so we know he is happy. Mother and Aunt Gerty sit one on each side of the bow window the greater part of the day, and make blouses, and read at the same time. George would throw their books into the harbour if he caught them in their hands; they are the sort he disapproves of. I won’t say who the authors of these are, as being a literary man’s daughter it might give offence, but they are by women mostly. George vetoes women’s books too, for they are generally bad, and if they are good, they have no business to be.
Just now, George isn’t here to object, he is at Homburg, doing a cure. He always gets brain fag towards the end of the season like his other friends. It seems to me the smartest illness to have, except appendicitis. The moment Goodwood is over, they all troop off to Germany or Switzerland and pay pounds to some doctor who only makes them leave off eating and drinking too much, and go to bed a little before daylight. It is kill and then cure with the smart set, every year. George does what isright and usual—bathes in champagne at Wiesbaden, and drinks the water rotten eggs have been boiled in at Homburg. He does it in good company, to take the taste away. Mr. Aix drew us a picture of George and a Duchess walking up and down a parade, with a glass tube connected with a tumbler, in their mouths, talking about emulating “The Life of the Busy Bee” as they went along.
About the middle of August we heard he had come back to England and was paying his usual round of visits to Barefront, and Baddeley and Fylingdales Tower. Nearly all these places have real battlements and ghosts. Fylingdales Tower is near here. Mother and I and Aunt Gerty joined a cheap trip to it, the other day, and were taken all over the house for a shilling. I don’t even believe The Family was away, but stowed awaypro tem.and staring at us through some chink and loathing us. I did manage to persuade Aunt Gerty not to throw away her sandwich paper in the grate of the fire-place of the room where Edward the Third had slept on his way to Alnwick, but kindly keep it till we were got into the Park. But she was very irreverent all the same, and insisted on setting her hat straight in the glass of Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, and that was the only picture she looked at at all. I don’t care for pictures much. I like the house, which is old and grey and bleached, as if it never got a good night’s sleep. Too many spirits to break its rest. I don’t believe in ghosts really, but I often wonder what are the white things one sees? I don’t seeso many as I did when I was quite a child. Aunt Gerty shivered and went Brr! She hated it all, she is so very modern. She admitted that she only went with us because she had hoped George might be actually staying there, and would see his own sister-in-law among the trippers and get a nasty jar. Mother is a lady, and knew quite well that he wasn’t there, or else she would not have let Aunt Gerty go, or gone herself, evenincog.Georgehadbeen there recently, though, for the black-satin housekeeper said so, and that she read his books herself when she had time, or a headache. “He’s quite a pet of her ladyship’s,” she told Aunt Gerty, who had spotted one of George’s books on a table and asked questions. She was dying to tell the old thing that we were relations of the great Mr. Vero-Taylor, but dursn’t, for Mother’s eye was on her. Mother looked as pleased as Punch though, and gazed at the chairs (behind plush railings) that her husband had sat on, and at the portrait in Greek dress, by Sir Alma Tadema, of the lady who “made a pet of him.”
George had written from Homburg once or twice to me, and I used to read his letters out to Mother, who naturally wanted to hear his news. She was a little annoyed because he didn’t mention if he was wearing the thicker vests as the weather was getting chilly, and begged me to ask him to be explicit in my next, but I did not, because it might have shamed him in the eyes of his countesses if he left the letter about, as of course he would. George respects thesanctity of private communication so much, that he never tore up a letter in his life; the housemaid collects them when she is doing his room, and brings them to Mother, who hasn’t time to read them, any more than the housemaid has.
The third week in August George wrote to me, and told me to engage him rooms in Fylingdales Crescent on the East Cliff. You might have knocked me down with a feather!
Mother was hurt at George’s having written to me, not her, on such a pure matter of business, until I explained that he merely did it to please the child! One doesn’t mind making oneself out a baby to avoid hurting a mother’s feelings. I don’t know if Mother quite accepted this explanation, but she said no more about it, and told Mr. Aix the good news. He is in lodgings here, to be near us—Aunt Gerty thinks it is to be near her, and he lets her think anything she likes. He looks forward to George’s coming with great interest, and says he will look like some rare exotic on the beach, such as a humming-bird or a gazelle. Aunt Gerty at once got hold of the visitors’ list.
“Let’s see which of his little lot is coming to Whitby?” she said, and hunted carefully through three columns till she found that Adelaide Countess of Fylingdales, Mr. Sidney Robinson, nurse baby and suite, were at the Fylingdales Hotel, on the East Cliff. Lord Fylingdales, her eldest son, is the widower of a Gaiety girl who actually died after she had been a Countess a year, poor dear! Aunt Gertyknew her. He is Lord of the Manor here, and his portrait is all over the place.
“Old Adelaide’s a shocking frump, Lucy; you needn’t distress yourself about her!” said Aunt Gerty consolingly to Mother.
“I am not distressing myself about her, Gertrude,” replied my Mother, and she didn’t look at all distressed in her neat short blue serge seaside dress, and shady hat. She looked ten.
“I know her son,” Aunt Gerty went on. “A fish without a backbone. I very nearly had the privilege of leading him astray myself. It is Irene Lauderdale now, I hear.”
“I wish you’d stow your theatrical recollections, Gerty,” said Mother. “Come, Tempe, get your things on, we will go and take rooms for your father and my husband.”
“Brava!” said Mr. Aix. “Capital accent there.”
“Oh, you go along!” said Mother, and we went off at once and engaged George’s rooms. We got very nice large ones, with dark green outside shutters to the windows, and took a great deal of trouble to explain George’s little ways to them, for their sake as well as his. Ben will valet him. Mother told the people that he is bringing his man, who will, however, sleep out. George never gets up till twelve, French fashion.
Poor Ben, he may as well make himself useful, for he certainly isn’t ornamental just now. He can’t speak, he can only croak, and though he isn’t very big, he seems to have the power of burrowinginside himself and bringing up a great voice like a steam-roller. He is not a manly man, yet, but he certainly is a boily boy. He has got some spots on his face that he thinks much bigger than they really are, and he keeps them and himself out of sight as much as possible. He says just now he doesn’t care at all what he does, he doesn’t even mind playing servant for a bit, if George would like it. Mother tells him he is a good boy and the comfort of her life, and that if she can manage it, she will get him sent to college after this, only he had better please the mammon of unrighteousness all he can. So he means to be a good valet to the Mammon.
The Fylingdales Hotel is in the best part of the town, on the East Cliff, and they dine late there every evening, and don’t pull the blinds down, and the townspeople walk backwards and forwards, and watch the people dining at seven-thirty, dressed in their nudity. I think evening dress looks quite wrong at the seaside. Aunt Gerty and Mother put on a different blouse every evening, and look nice and cosy and comfortable, though George does say sarcastic things about the tyranny of the blouse, and the way Aunt Gerty will call it Blowse. I wash my face, that is all the dressingIdo. Ben puts on an old smoker of George’s, and flattens out his hair to support the character of being the only gentleman of the party, unless Mr. Aix is there to supper, and the less said about Mr. Aix’s clothes the better.
Ben makes boats all day, when he isn’t in one, and Ariadne makes poetry. Her one idea, having cometo the sea for her health, is to avoid it, and seek the rather scrubby sort of woods which is all you can expect at the seaside. So every afternoon nearly we take a donkey to Ruswarp or to Cock Mill, and “ride and tie.” We used to pick out a very smart donkey, but a very naughty one. He was called Bishop Beck, perhaps for that reason, and he went slow,—that was to be expected, but when he stopped quite still and wouldn’t move for an hour or more in the middle of Cock Mill Wood, long, long after one had stopped beating him (for he looked at us and made us feel ridiculous), Ariadne said she would rather do without adventitious aid of this kind, for it interfered with her afflatus.
She walks up and down in the wood paths, finding rhymes, which seems the hardest part of poetry.
“Dreams—streams—gleams—” she goes on.
“Breams?” I suggest.
“Not a poetical image!”
“It isn’t an image, it is a fish.”
“It won’t do. Am I writing this poem or are you?”
I don’t argue. It doesn’t really matter much how Ariadne’s poems turn out. Being Papa’s daughter she is sure to find a hearty reception for her initial volume of verse.
We used to stay out till what Ariadne called Dryad time. She thought she saw white figures hiding behind the trees in the dusk. Little pellets made of nuts and acorns and dead leaves, and so on, used to fall on us out of the thickets, and Ariadnesaid it was the Dryads pelting us. She thinks trees are alive, and that one of the reasons you hear ghosts in all old houses, is the wood creaking because in the night it remembers it was once a tree. I prefer to believe in ordinary solid ghosts instead of rational explanations like that. But still Ariadne’s funny ideas make a walk quite interesting. Of course we never talk of such things at home, among materialists and realists like Aunt Gerty and Mother and George. George makes plenty of use of birds in his books, but he once came home from a visit to St. John’s College at Cambridge, and told us that he had been kept awake all night by a beastly nightingale under his window. Now I have never heard this much-vaunted bird, but I am sure, from Matthew Arnold’s poem where he calls it Eugenia, it must be a heavenly sound, quite worth while being kept awake by.
Ariadne and I stay out very late till it is getting dark, hoping to hear it, in Cock Mill Wood, and then we go home and race through supper, and then go out again, on the quays and piers this time. We don’t know or care what George and his friends are doing, up above us, in the smart hotel on the cliff. What I should just love would be for some of them and George to come down for a walk in the dark and perhaps meet us, and for George to say, “Who are those little wandering vagabonds flitting about like bats? Why doesn’t their father or mother keep them at home in the evenings?” It would be so nice, and Arabian Nightish!
At very high tides, we stay out very late, and take a shawl, and sit on a capstan and tuck it round us, and listen for a certain noise we love. It is when the water gets into a little corner in the heap of stones by the Scotch Head, and gets sucked in among them somehow, and then we hear a sort of sob that is better than any ghost. Ariadne and I put our heads under the shawl when we hear it, but not quite, so as to prevent us hearing properly.
The harbour smells at low water, and the town children yell and scream, and it isn’t poetical then. So Ariadne and I like to go away on the Scaur and put our fingers in anemones’ mouths, and pop seaweed purses, and pretend we are lovers cut off by the tide, as they are in novels. In the afternoons when the harbour is full we sit on the mound above the Khyber Pass, and watch the water filling up the hole between the opposite cliff and the cliff ladder. It is all quite quiet then. We don’t hear any town cries, for the children that make the noise are turned out of their playground, and their mothers out of their good drying-ground, and the boats begin to go out of the harbour in a long, soft, slow procession—
And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill.
And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill.
I am sure Tennyson meant Whitby when he wrote that.
One night we could not sleep because the woman next door had had her “man” drowned, and cried and moaned for hours. He was a fisherman, andwe had seen his boat go out third in the row the day before. He is supposed to have fallen overboard in the night? Next day, Mother went in and gave her five shillings and she stopped crying.
Mr. Aix had a try to paint the view in front of our windows. At least he said there was no such thing in nature as a “view,” and left out the Church and the Abbey, because they “conventionalized” things so. He belongs, he said, to the Impressionist School, if any. He got quite excited about his drawing, and at last went and borrowed a station truck to sit on; it raised him a little. One day a chance lady sat down on one of the handles, and over he went. It served him right for leaving out the two best things in Whitby.
When George came, Ariadne and I used to take turns to go and lunch with him at his breakfast, where we had French cookery. There were leathery omelets that bounced up like the stick in the boys’ game when you touched the end of them with a spoon, and fillets that you wouldn’t have condescended to have for a pillow, but still, it was French.
We were dressed nicely and took our clean gloves in our hands, and George wasn’t ashamed of us, and introduced us to his friends. Lady Fylingdales’ Mr. Sidney Robinson said I was like George—that I had his nose. I went to bed that night with a clothes-peg out of the yard on it, to improve its shape. But the old lady was half blind, and all made of manner. I also saw the Lord Aunt Gertymight have led astray, and he hadn’t a manner of any sort, and his nose wanted to run away with his chin.
George had no fault whatever to find with the arrangements Mother had made for his comfort, and he told her so, the first time he saw her, in Baxter Gate, coming out of the Post Office. The first place George flies to in a town is the Post Office, to send telegrams. He corresponds entirely by telegram with some people; he says it is paying five-pence more for the privilege of saying less. We had been shopping. George spotted us, and Mother thought he had rather not be recognized, but he was good that day and he actually left Mr. Sidney Robinson—a commoner, married to a countess, and that exactly describes him, Aunt Gerty says—to say a word to his own wife. It was market day, and we had bought several things in the Hall across the water. A pound of blackberries and a cream cheese, and a chicken and a cabbage, each from a different old woman with a covered basket. Mother had a net and I a basket to put them in. I was glad that George did not offer to “relieve” us of them, like the young men Aunt Gerty picks up here; but he stopped and talked to us quite nicely for a long time. He and Mother seemed to have a great deal to say to each other, and the basket-handle began to cut my arm in half. Also it was a very hot day. George had on a white linen suit, and a straw hat from Panama. He looked quite cool, and like Lohengrin or the Baker’s man. Mother didn’t. Shelooked hot. I touched her elbow, not so much because of my arm that ached, but because she looked like that, nor did I think it looks well to stand talking in the street to gentlemen, even if it is your own husband.
“Well, George,” she said, taking my hint at once, “we must be going on. The butter is melting and the chicken grilling and the cabbage wilting while I stand here talking to you.”
“Charming!” said George, but he wasn’t thinking of us, but of Mr. Robinson, who was champing a few yards away. We said “Good-bye” without shaking hands. George, I think, might have lifted his hat. I have read of fine gentlemen who lifted their hat to an apple-woman, let alone their wife and child.
George and his friend walked off together. I suppose the Robinson man was too well-bred to ask George who his lady-friend was, as any of Aunt Gerty’s men would do, but he certainly stared a good deal. Of course he knows who we are, everybody in Whitby does, I should think, and they most likely conclude that it is less unkindness than the eccentricity of genius. If you haven’t got that blasted thing called genius, I suppose you can bear to live in the same house with your wife!
We walked slowly home with our purchases. Mother had a headache all dinner, and lay down in the afternoon.
“I met your father, Ben,” she said at supper. “His boots want a little attention.”
“I don’t believe,” said Ben crossly, “that any one ever had a more tiresome man to valet. He will wear his clothes all wrong, and then is always ragging and jawing at a fellow because they don’t look nice.”
“Hush, Ben, he is your father.”
“Hah, I was forgetting!” said Ben, and gave one of his great laughs, as if you were breaking up coal, or something. Ben is now so changeable and nervous that you never know where to have him. He is growing up all wrong, but what can you expect of a boy brought up by women? He never sees a boy of his own position, though I know that in London he has some low companions he daren’t bring to the house. The Hitchings are his only respectable friends, but they live such a long way off now. Jessie Hitchings is devoted to Ben, but she is only a girl like Ariadne and me. Mr. Hitchings told mother, years ago, that the boy was being ruined, and Mother cried and said she knew it, but could do nothing, for his father was by way of educating him at home till something could be settled. Snaps of Latin, and snacks of Greek, that is all George gives the poor boy when he has a moment, and that is never.
This is the only grievance Mother has, although Aunt Gerty is always trying to persuade her she has several, and putting her back up. Mother ends by getting cross with her.
“For goodness’ sake, you Job’s comforter, you, leave off your eternal girding at George. Can’t yousee, that as long as a man has his career to establish—his way to make——”
“His blessed thoroughfare is made long ago, or ought to be. That is what I can’t get over——”
“You aren’t asked to get over it. It is not your funeral, it is mine, so shut up. A man like George, who is dependant on the public favour, needs to be most absurdly particular, and careful what he does lest he injure his prestige. Look at yourself! You know very well in your own profession how very damaging it is for an actor to be married; that if an actress marries her manager, he has to pay dear for it in the receipts. She had better not figure as his wife in the bills, if she wants him to get on. You can’t eat your cake—I mean your title—and have it. No, it’s bound to be Miss Gertrude Jennynge on the bills, even if it is Mrs. What-do-you-call-it in the lodgings, with a ring on her finger, and every right to call herself a married woman. The public don’t care for spliced idols. An artist has to stand clear, and preserve his individuality, such as it is!”
“And run straight all the time. I’ll give George credit for that. But there, whatever’s the good of it to you? A man can make a woman pretty fairly miserable, even if he is stone-faithful to her. It’s then it seems all wrong somehow, and doesn’t give her a chance of paying him in his own coin!”
I think Aunt Gerty is the reason why George fights so shy of his family. He hates her style,and yet he can hardly forbid Mother seeing as much as she likes of her own sister. The trail of the stage is over us all. Not that I see anything a bit wicked about the stage myself! I have never noticed anything at all wrong, and actors and actresses are the kindest people in the world! But there is a queer, worn, threadbare, rough, second-rate feeling about them. Off the stage—and I have never seen them on—they are tired and slouchy and easy-going. Aunt Gerty is most good-tempered and will do anything to help a pal, and takes things as they come; those are her good points. But she talks such a lot about herself, and never opens a book that isn’t a novel, and wears cheap muslins and beaded slippers in the street, and lots of chains that seem to be always getting caught on men’s buttons. She calls men “fellows.” She is always going to play Juliet at one of the London houses. Meantime she puts up with provincial companies. She makes the best of it, and she tells us she is going to play Nerissa in the Bacon Company, as if she had got engaged for a parlourmaid in a good house, and discusses Ariel as if Ariel were a tweeny or up-and-down girl between the sky and the earth, and Puck a smart clever Buttons. She speaks of her nice legs as a workman might of his bag of tools. She can sing and dance, when she isn’t asked to act. She has cut all her hair short to make it easier for wigs. Her great extravagance is in wigs. She calls them “sliding roofs” for convenience in talking about them in trains and omnibuses. When shedid wear her own hair she dyed it, so I like the wigs better, as there’s no deception.
If Mother was ever an actress, which I don’t somehow believe, though Jessie Hitchings said once that she had heard people say so, it has all been knocked out of her. She dresses very well, always in simpler things than Aunt Gerty. She left off her waist years ago, to please George, and now that it is the fashion not to have one, she is in the right box—I mean stays. Her hair is brown, and she mayn’t frizzle it, so it is soft and pretty like a baby’s. She generally wears black, over lovely white frilled petticoats that she gets up herself to keep the bills down. She has such little hands that she can pick her gloves out of the five-and-a-half boxes at sales, which are always much reduced. So few people have small hands. She may not wear high heels, and that is a grief to her, as she isn’t very tall, but hers are very pretty feet, and she can dance.
George doesn’t know that she can dance. I do. Once Mr. Aix asked her to dance for him when I was in the room. Aunt Gerty played on the tin-kettle piano. Mother danced a cake-walk, which I thought very ugly, and then a queer step that a friend had taught her when she was a child. In one part of it she was dancing on her hands and her feet at the same time. It was the queerest thing, and she left her dress down for that and it lay in swirls about the carpet. Mr. Aix said it was the dance that Salome must have danced before Herod, and he quite understood John the Baptist, andwhere did she get it? But Mother wouldn’t tell him. She said it was a memory of her stormy youth in the East End.
Mr. Aix said that she could make her fortune doing it as a turn at a Society music hall, as it would be something quite new and decadent. That is just what Society wants—the slight, morbid flavour! Then Mother put on her short skirt and did the ordinary vulgar kind of dance they teach now, and I liked it best. She was everywhere at once, smart and spreading out in all directions, like spun glass on a Christmas card. Her eyes danced too. Ben said he couldn’t have believed she was his mother!
Then Aunt Gerty performed, and she is professional. But it was not the same thing. Aunt Gerty’s legs are thick, and compared with Mother’s like forced asparagus to the little pretty, thin, field-grown kind. Mother’s dancing was emphatically dramatic, Mr. Aix said.
I asked him if Mother could act, and he answered, “My dear child, your mother can do anything she has a mind to.”
“Then why doesn’t she have a mind?” I at once said, forgetting how it would upset our household and George if she were to go on the stage. Mother naturally remembers this, and stays domestic out of virtue.
“I wish you would write a play for me, Mr. Aix,” said Aunt Gerty, “and I would get a millionaire to run it. I wonder, now, what one could do with Mr. Bowser?”
She went off in a brown study, and Mr. Aix said rudely, “I will write a play for Lucy sooner,” looking at Mother, who was sitting fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief. “She has got the stuff in her, I do believe. Gad! What a chance! What a lever! What a facer—!”
And he dropped off into a brown study too! Mother went and mended Ben’s blazer.
Mr. Aix isn’t staying with us, we have no room in our house; he has a room over the coast-guard’s wife, but he comes in to us for his meals. I don’t believe George realizes this, or he would tell him he is throwing himself away, and losing a good chance of advertising his books. Mr. Aix’s books seem to go without advertising, more than George’s do—I suppose it is because they are so improper.
At any rate, he prefers to throw in his lot with us. One day we were all having a picnic-tea at Cock Mill. The party consisted of Mother, me and Ariadne, Aunt Gerty and Mr. Aix, and an actor friend of hers and his wife, who was acting for a week at the Saloon Theatre. Mr. Bowser, whom Aunt Gerty wants either to marry or get a theatre out of, was with us too. They call him the King of Whitby, because he owns so many plots in it, and is going to stand for it in the brewing interest next election. We had secured the nicest table, the one nearest the stream, and had just tucked our legs neatly under it, when a carriage drove up. Aunt Gerty and the King of Whitby were at that momentin the old woman’s cottage who gives us the hot water, toasting tea-cakes.
The Fylingdales’ party got out of that carriage, and George got slowly down off the box. They trooped into the enclosure, and Mr. Sidney Robinson, trying to be funny, asked the old woman if she could see her way to giving them some tea.
“Here o’ puppose, Sir!” said she, as of course she is. She pointed out the table that was left and that led them past us.
If Aunt Gerty had been there with Mr. Bowser she would certainly have claimed George as a relation and said something awkward, but she was luckily toasting tea-cakes, and had perhaps not even seen them. I saw George just look at Mother, and I saw her smile a very little, and make him a sign that he was to go right past us, and not speak or seem to know us before. Of course Mr. Aix never spoils any one’s game, not even George’s. So he went on talking hard to the actor’s wife, though I saw his lip curl. I, of course, never need be given a cue twice, so I kicked Mother hard under the table for sympathy, but preserved a calm superior.
Aunt Gerty and Mr. Bowser came out with plates full of tea-cakes they had cooked, and I didn’t know if it was the fire or Mr. Bowser had made Aunt Gerty’s cheeks so red—I hoped the latter for her sake. They had no idea of what had happened while they had been toasting and flirting, it appeared from their manners, which were bad. Aunt Gerty always puts an extra polish on hers whenGeorge is present, and even Mr. Bowser would have added a frill or so to suit the aristocracy.
Our party was very gay. Actors all can make you laugh if they can do nothing else, and our shrieks of laughter must have made the other party quite envious, for they were as quiet as a mouse and as dull as the stream all overshadowed with nut-bushes and alders that grew over it just there.
Suddenly George got up, and left them, and came over to us, and Aunt Gerty swallowed her tea the wrong way round, and had to have her shoulder thumped.
George took no notice of her, but put his hand on Mr. Aix’s shoulder and said something to him in a low voice.
“Not if I know it!” Mr. Aix answered, quite violently, adding, “Many thanks, old fellow, I am happier where I am.”
George looked awfully put out. Of course I knew what he wanted. Those smart people up at the other table had expressed a wish to see Mr. Aix. He is a successful though painfully realistic novelist, and George had told them he was actually sitting at the next table, and had promised to bring him over to them to be introduced. In his disappointment, he glared at us all, especially the actor, who didn’t care a brass farthing for George’s displeasure, and went on eating tea-cakead nauseam.
“Oh, all right!” said George, to cover his vexation, “if you prefer to bury yourself in a——”
“Easy all!” Mr. Aix said. “Leave everybodyto enjoy themselves in their own way. And we are depriving your delightful friends of——”
George had turned and gone back to his delightful friends long before Mr. Aix had finished his sentence, and Aunt Gerty patted the poor man on the back till he wriggled.
“Loyal fellow!” she said several times. She had got well on to it now, and she started a fit of giggles that lasted all the rest of the time we were there. It didn’t matter much, for we were all quite drunk on weak tea and laughter.
But we turned as silent as mice as the Fylingdales’ party, having had enough of their dull tea, streamed past us, and got into their carriage, and rolled away. George was not with them. I dare say he had got over the hedge and gone round to meet the break by the road, not wanting to walk past our party again, and to avoid unpleasantness. I supposed he had paid for the tea; but no, this grand party forgot to do that, so that in the end Mr. Aix paid for their refreshment for the old woman’s sake that she should not suffer.
When they had gone, we felt relieved; but it sobered us somehow. Aunt Gerty and the gentlemen smoked quietly, and we were so still that we could hear the little beck bubbling over the loose stones beside us. Then Aunt Gerty was persuaded to recite something, and she did “Loraine, Loraine, Loree!” in a shy, modest voice. You see these were all her real bosses, and she valued their approval, and the actor’s wife is considered verystiff in the profession. She herself sang “The banks of Allan Water” very sadly and solidly, and Aunt Gerty cried. To cheer us all up again the actor—rather a famous one, Mr. D—L——, did one of his humorous recitations out of his London repertory for us, so that we nearly died with laughing, and Aunt Gerty dried her tears, and whispered to me that trying to laugh like a lady was so painful that she longed to take a short cut out of her stays.
LADYSCILLYcame to Whitby and took a big house in St. Hilda’s Terrace.
“They can’t be parted long, poor things!” Aunt Gerty said, and Mother hushed her. She brought her great friend Miss Irene Lauderdale with her, for a good blow, before she went to America.
Then all the shops came out with portraits of Irene, in “smalls” as Dick Turpin, and Irene as “The Pumpeydore,” and Irene as Greek Slave, and Irene in Venus. They had her on picture postcards too in all the principal stationers’ windows. I should have thought she would have been ashamed to walk down the street, hung with her own likeness like a row of looking-glasses that reflected her. But these very languid—what Aunt Gerty calls “la-di-dah” sort of people—can stand anything, so long as it’s public.
When she wasn’t dressed up as Turpin or Pompadour or Venus, she was just a tall, thin, and ragged-looking woman. She had red lips that stuck out a long, long way, and crinkly red hair, and large eyes like two gig-lamps coming at you down the street. She generally had a dog with her, and its lead keptgetting twisted round the wheels of carts, and round my father’s legs as he walked along Skinner Street beside her. He wouldn’t have stood that from any one but a popular favourite.
I was walking along behind them a few days after she came, with Aunt Gerty. They stopped at Truelove’s and looked at the picture-postcards. She became very serious all at once.
“I must go in and procure Myself!” she said to George, sniggling. In they went, and Aunt Gerty and I walked in after them. Mrs. Truelove’s shop and library are very dark. As for the morality of it, we had as good a right to buy picture-postcards as they, and, as I had ascertained from other rencounters of this kind, George knows very well how to ignore his family when needful for his policy. I do not resent it, for one never knows how a daughter’s presence may interfere with a father’s plans and arrangements, and I am sure I don’t want to injure his sales!
Irene turned over all the cards, including the Venus set, and did not approve of them, especially of the ones where she is turning away her face altogether.
“The blighted idiot!” she said, meaning I suppose the photographer, “has completely missed my beautiful Botticelli back! The effect is decidedly meretricious. I am a very good woman. Ah, these are better!”
She had got hold of some of herself in a spoon bonnet and long jacket, and she sang out loud, whileAunt Gerty’s open mouth betrayed her shock at her audacity—
“Oh, I’m Contrition Eliza,And she’s Salvation Jane.We once were wrong, we now are right,We’ll never go wrong again.”
“Oh, I’m Contrition Eliza,And she’s Salvation Jane.We once were wrong, we now are right,We’ll never go wrong again.”
“I can’t quite promise that, alas! My friends won’t let me. I will send Salvation Jane to Lord R——y, a very dear old friend of mine. A dozen dozen, please; isn’t that a gross? Oh, what a naughty word! Will you pay, Mr. Vero-Taylor?”
“Good business!” said my Aunt. “Let me see? How much has she rooked him?”
“Please don’t ask me to do sums,” said I. “Besides, George has a perfect right to do as he pleases with his own money!”
George paid cheerfully, and then asked for some cards with cats on them.
“Whatever do you want them for?” asked Irene. (He never lets me say whatever.)
“To send to my children.”
“Ah, yes, your sweet children! Where are they?” she asked.
“In the nursery,” was George’s answer, as if he cared whether we were in the copper or the stockpot! It saved him from having to say Whitby, however.
“And now,” she said, “do me a great kindness. Buy me your last great book.”
“There ought to be some of my work here,” George replied gravely, and made a move in our direction,where Mrs. Truelove was. Mrs. Truelove sings in the choir at the Church upon the Hill, and so loud she would bring the roof off nearly, but in her own shop she is as mild as a lamb. George asked her forDewlaps(of which the heroine is a Tuscan cow), andThe Pretty Lady, of which Lady Scilly is the heroine, andThe Light that was on Land and Sea, andSimple Simon, of which the hero really was a pieman, only an Italian one. Poor Mrs. Truelove looked blank.
“I am afraid, Sir, we do not stock them, but I can order——”
George interrupted her. “Such is Fame! I have no doubt,Belle Irene, that if you were to ask for any one of Aix’s books—The Dustman, orThe Laundress, orSlackbaked!you would be offered a plethora of them.”
Irene took her cue. “But,” she drawled, “it is extraordinary! Impossible! Inconceivable! Books like yours, that rejoice the thirsty soul, that refrigerate the arid body, that bring God’s great gift of sunshine down into our too gloomy grey homes! I always say this, dear, dear Mr. Vero-Taylor, that you, of all men, have caught the secret of imprisoning the jolly sunbeams. Every page of yours is instinct with light——”
It sounded like an advertisement of some new kind of soap. Aunt Gerty didn’t like it at all, and in a rage with George she put out her hand suddenly and spilt a vase of flowers in water.
“Brute!” she said, and the assistant who mopped up the water kept saying, “Not at all!” not thinkingAunt Gerty meant the gentleman who had just left the shop in haste, but as apologizing for her own stupidity in upsetting the water.
“Who was that lady?” I asked Aunt Gerty as we went home, though I knew well enough.
“Izzie Lawder, a lady! I remember her—well, perhaps I hadn’t better say what I remember her! She and I—she had got on a bit ahead of me even then—played together at the ’Lane’ in ‘Devil Darling!’ ten years ago. She has got on since. Everybody to give her a leg up! You know the sort—dyed hair and interest! She soon left nice honest me behind.”
“Hadn’t you the interest, Aunt Gerty?” I knew she had the other thing.
“Don’t be impertinent, Miss. Let us get home and tell Lucy. Won’t she be electrified!”
But Mother wasn’t a bit electrified.
“All in the way of business, my dear girl!” she said to Aunt Gerty, who chattered about Irene all the rest of that day. “Do subside about my wrongs, if you don’t mind. I dare say he wants to get her to play lead in the drama he is writing with Lady Scilly, and that is why he is so civil to her.”
“Another ill-bred amateur! What will they make of it?” snorted Aunt Gerty.
“Irene Lauderdale is Lady Scilly’s best friend.”
“Best enemy, you mean. However, it is the same thing. These unnatural friendships between Society women and actresses sicken me! Alwaysin each other’s pockets! It is a bad advertisement for them both, and there she was, plastering George up with compliments about his books, that I don’t believe she has ever read a single one of. Sunshine indeed! He may well put sunshine into his novels; he has taken pretty good care to take it all out of one poor woman’s life!”
“I am perfectly happy, Gertrude. I look happy, I am sure.”
“You sham it.”
“That is the next best thing to being it.”
“A wretched skim-milk substitute! You are a right good sort, Lucy, and have got a husband that doesn’t come within a hundred miles of appreciating you.”
“Yes, he does, and at my true value, I suspect. I am good for what I do; I know my place and I fill it. I should only hamper George if I insisted on sharing his life and knowing his friends. I am too low for some of them, I admit; but I am too high for Irene Lauderdale. I wouldn’t condescend to have anything to do with her. I despise and scorn her!” said Mother quite loudly for her, and suddenly too, as she began so mild.
I thought what a good actress she would have made. I believe Aunt Gerty thought so too, for she screamed out, “Bravo, Luce!” Mother burst into tears. I don’t think it is nice for a daughter to see a mother’s tears, so I left the room and went into the back room where Ben was messing at something as boys will. I told him on no account whateverto go into the front room to Mother till half-an-hour had elapsed. I thought that was enough law to give her. Ben naturally asked why, and hit me over the head, not hard—Ben is a gentleman and always tempers the blow to the shy sister, but still I preferred taking a whack to giving Mother away.
A few days after that Mother went up to Fylingdales Crescent to see George on business, and found him in bed with a bad cold. You see these Society people, who are only getting their amusement cheap out of George, don’t understand the constitution of their toy, and he doesn’t like to let them see that he is only a mortal author, and that it is death to him to be without his hat for a minute or his coat for half-an-hour. He has got a very sensitive mucous membrane and catches cold in no time. I sometimes think it is the opposite of Faith-healing with him—Georgebelieveshimself into his colds. He says that the sensitive mucous is the invariable concomitant of the artistic temperament, which he has. Mr. Aix says he hasn’t that, what he has is the bilio-lymphatic one, and that makes George very angry. However this may be, the tiniest bit of swagger costs him a cold in the head, and that is what he has now. He had already altered his will and begun to talk of flying to the South to be extinguished there gently, when Mother came to him.
“My dear boy, no!” Mother said, and George groaned as he always does when she calls him boy, but invalids can’t be choosers of phrases. “You aren’t going to die just yet.” She went on, kindlybanging his pillows about—“I shall have to stay here with you a little, though, I fancy, to look after you. I shouldn’t wonder if they didn’t make objections in the house. There will be a bit of a fuss.”
“Who will make a fuss, Mother?” I asked, “and why should they?”
“Don’t ask questions about what you don’t understand,” Mother said sharply, though what else really should I ask questions about? “Run home and tell your Aunt that I am going to get a room here for a night or two, and that she is to send my things, just what I’ll want for a couple of nights.”
“Night-gown and toothbrush,” said I. As I left George put out his hand to Mother and said quite nicely—
“You are very good to me, dear. And can you really stay and soothe the sick man’s pillow?”
Mother sat down and put the blanket in its proper place, not grazing his cheek, and gave him a drink, and read to him out of Anatole France. She kept saying, “Iknowthey’ll think I am not respectable.”
The thought seemed to amuse her very much, and George too, and I left them, and went home and gave Aunt Gerty her directions. Aunt Gerty chuckled as Mother had said she would, and said—
“This will clear up George’s ideas a little! Nothing like an ugly illness for letting a man know who his true friends are! Looks lovely, don’t he? Is its blessed poet’s nose a good deal swollen?”
I said no, George looked very nice in bed, a mixtureof the Pope and Napoleon combined. I left her and went back to Mother with her things. George by that time was arranged. He had a silk handkerchief tied over his forehead. He said he did that to keep his brain from being too active, like the British workman girds his loins with a belt before he begins to dig. He looked very happy and quite stupid. I took our cat Robert the Devil up with me and put him on George’s chest to soothe him. It did, and he played with my hair.
“I am an angel when I am ill,” he said; “don’t you find me so? Strong natures like mine——”
Mother then came in with a great bunch of roses,—seaside roses always look coarse, I think—and a lot of cards.
“Lord and Lady Scilly and Lady Fylingdales and Mr. Sidney Robinson and Lord John Daman have called to inquire, and Miss Irene Lauderdale has left these flowers for you, George. Look at them and be done with it, for I don’t mean to have them left messing about in my sick-room, exhausting the air. Tempe can take them home when you have smelt them, though I don’t suppose you can smell anything just now.”
She put them to his nose and he smelt. Irene’s card was on the top. It had a monogram in one corner—a gold skull and crossbones. I never heard of people having their monogram on their visiting-card before, but one lives and learns.
“I don’t, of course, expect you to admire The Lauderdale as a woman,” George said. “But what,as a dramatic authority, do you think of her as an actress?”
“I consider that dear old Ger could do quite as well if she had one half her chances,” Mother said eagerly.
“No doubt, no doubt! The cleverness lies in laying hold of the chances! Irene has a genius for advertisement.”
“Look after the ’ads,’” said my Mother, “and the acts will take care of themselves.”
“Good!” said George, “I should like to have said that myself.”
“I dare say you will, George,” said Mother quite nicely, “when once I get you well again.”
I do think Mother is rather fond of George: she got him cured in less than a week, but she didn’t let him out once during that time, and had him all to herself. It was great fun, seeing all his friends wandering about Whitby bored to death because Vero-Taylor was confined to the house. They used to get hold of me and Ariadne, and ask us how long they were going to be deprived of the pleasure of his society? They knew who we were by this time and made pets of us, as much as we would let them. I was too proud, but Ariadne’s decision was complicated by a hopeless attachment she had started. “Love is enough!” she used to say, “and Imustgo to Saltergate with the Scillys, for Simon is going!”
THEyoung man that Ariadne loves is a more than friend of Lady Scilly, and I knew him first. He was there that day I lunched for the first time. On rice-pudding, I remember. Ariadne hardly knew him till we came here, though they had both taken part in Christina’s wedding. He had just noticed her then; for once she was well turned out. On the strength of that notice she asked him to call, and he didn’t; he would call now if she asked him, but we don’t want him coming to the house on the quay, for we couldn’t insulate Aunt Gerty.
He stays with Lady Scilly in the house she has taken in St. Hilda’s Terrace. Irene Lauderdale is there. He hates Irene, and contrives never to be in her company more than he can help! That’s one to us.
His own family lives up in the dales, Pickering way. George stayed there once, when Lady Hermyre was alive, and builds a sort of little recitation on what he observed in his friend’s house. Whatever isn’t ormolu is buhl. There are six Portland vases along the cornice of the house containing the ashes of the family. Portraits of stiff horses andsquat owners all the way up-stairs. Everything, including the butler, excessivelycollet monté, excepting the portraits of the ladies of the family, frowning ascetically over their own bodicesdécolleté à outrance. Sir Frederick is one of the most prominent racing men of Yorkshire, and the stables are model, but the house isn’t. Prayers, bed at ten, no bridge, and early breakfast, and prayers again. I don’t think George will ever be asked again, but I don’t wonder Lady Scilly was able to get hold of Simon.Shedoesn’t frown over herdécolletébodices, and she is amusing in her silly way. Simon hangs round like one of those young fox-hound puppies “at walk” that one sees in the villages, and Lord Scilly looks after his future and got him into the Foreign Office. I believe, though, Lord Scilly twigs about Ariadne caring for him, that Lady Scilly doesn’t, or else she would not let him out so freely. She would be like most teachers and insist on her pupil’s finishing his term. A wise woman would not have brought Irene Lauderdale down here, to preoccupy her. It will take her all her time to keep Simon away from Ariadne, if once I give my mind to it. I do. Ariadne and Simon don’t make appointments, but they keep them. I am generally there, but I don’t count. There is the Geological Museum on the Quay, which is never used for anything but casual appointments, and the old Library, where they have all the three-volume people, Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Jewsbury and Mrs. Oliphant. Ariadne and I read three a day regularly. We sometimes meet Simon on the quay,when we are carrying a whole hodful, and Ariadne won’t let him carry them for her, she doesn’t like him to know that she is reading all about Love.
Simon doesn’t really want to find out. He never wants very much anything. He never fights any point. That is what I like about him, and hate about Bohemians. They never glide or slip over things, they always scrape and drag and insist. But people who have got their roots in the country, as Simon has, are simple and not fussy and have no fads. I wonder what Simon thinks of George? It is the last thing he would tell me or Ariadne. He likes Mr. Aix, rather, but he would not, perhaps, if he had read any of his novels? Mr. Aix makes him laugh, and I like to hear his nice little curly laugh. If only Simon’s eyes were bigger, he really would be very handsome. Ariadne’s, however, are big enough for two.
This is the first time she has ever been in love, she says, and it hurts—women. It doesn’t hurt a man who loves in vain, only clears up his ideas a little, and shows him the kind of girl he really does want when the first choice refuses him. A refusal from first choice only sends him straight off with his heart in his mouth to second choice, who is waiting for the chance of him. I am sure that is the way most marriages are made—hearts on the rebound. The first girl is a true benefactor to her species, and gets her fun and her practice into the bargain. Ariadne has now reduced this to a system, from novels. In refusing, you must remember to hopeafter you have said that it can never be, that you will at least always be friends. With regard to accepting, she thinks and I think, that the nicest way is to hide your burning face on the lapel of his coat and say nothing, and then when you come up again the rough stuff of his coat has made you blush, a thing neither Ariadne nor I have ever been able to manage for ourselves.
Novels tell you all sorts of things, for instance, when and what to resent, otherwise you might say thank you! for what is really an affront. Out on the Cliff Walk the other day, it came on to rain, and a man offered to lend Ariadne his umbrella, and see her to her own door. A harmless, nay useful proposal. But my sister knew—from novels—that that sort of thing leads to all sorts of wickedness, and that she must unconditionally, absolutely refuse. She was broken-hearted at having to sacrifice her best hat, but bravely bowed and refused his offer, and went off in the rain, feeling his disappointed eyes right through the back of her head, and hearing the plop-plop of the rain-drops on the crown of her hat all the way home. But she had behaved well. That was her consolation.
Aunt Gerty took that man on afterwards—she met him turning out of the reading-room at the saloon, and he offered the very same umbrella! Aunt Gerty accepted it, and hopes to accept the owner too some day, for it was Mr. Bowser.
Ariadne goes the wrong way to work. Her one idea when she gets on at all with any man—andshe does get on with Simon, that is certain—is to collar him, to curtail his liberty, and give him as many opportunities of being alone with her as she can. She says it is an universal feminine instinct. Very well, if she chooses to be guided by this wretched feminine instinct, she will muff the whole thing. She should let the idea of being alone with her come from him, lead him on to propose it, and manage it himself, and then—squash it!
Men are very easily put off or frightened; a racehorse isn’t in it with them. To feel at ease, they must be made to think that it is all quite casual, that nobody has arranged anything, and that as for themselves, though there is no harm in them, no one particularly wants them. If they can get it into their heads that they won’t be conspicuous by their absence, they buck up immediately, and want to be in your pocket. When one is at a theatre, one is quite comforted by the sight of Extra Exit stuck up here and there, although I dare say if you came to thump at those doors in despair you would find it no go!
So when Ariadne makes a face at me to leave her, I don’t see it. I sit tight, wherever we are, knowing that young men adore being chaperoned. And at parties, if you notice, the one woman they never throw a word to is the woman they adore, and mean to secure. They want to marry her, not talk to her. The casual Society girl will do for that. Ariadne sometimes comes back from a party quite disconsolate, because so-and-so hasn’t said a wordmore than was strictly necessary for politeness to her.
“Excelsior!” I said. “I do really believe he is thinking of it.”
Simon always seems to have plenty of pocket-money, and gives to beggars in the street. Yet his eyes are little, and Cook always said that that goes with meanness. Anyway they are very bright, like an animal that you come on suddenly in a clump of green in a wood, perhaps I mean a hare? He always sees jokes first, and looks up and laughs. He is very keen on hunting, and singing, but his father snubs him, and says he doesn’t ride as straight as Almeria, and has no more voice than an old cock-sparrow. He would see better to ride if he wasn’t short-sighted, anyway. I don’t believe he ever reads, except Mr. Sponge’s Tour and Mr. Jorrocks’ something or other, and books in the Badminton Library. He knows a little history, about St. Hilda and the Abbey, and I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that he thought she was some sort of ancestress of his, and that Cædmon was a stable-boy about his Aunt Fylingdales’ estate.
I feel quite like a mother to him, and Ariadne loves him passionately, and is leaving off eating for his sake. Not on purpose exactly, but because she is so worried about him. He is awfully nice to her, but he never gets any nicer. He is nice to anybody; it is only because Ariadne is the only girl in the set here about his own age, that it seems as if it would be neat and right that he should fall in love with her.I am not quite sure that Simon can fall in love, it is the dull men who do that best, not the universal favourites. But if Simon has any love latent, I am anxious to get it all for Ariadne.
She hates herrings now, and doesn’t care for cream. She lives principally on jam-tarts and cheese-cakes. It is the proper thing to go about eleven in the morning to that shop on the quay and eat tarts and cheese-cakes standing, and watch people pass, and the bridge opening and shutting to let tall funnels go through. Ariadne sometimes has to wade through half-a-dozen tarts before Simon and Lady Scilly and the dogs and the rest of them come round the corner of Flowergate, and surely it is a pity to spoil your complexion for the sake of any young man in the world? No digestion could stand the way Ariadne treats hers for long. She plays it very low down on her constitution generally. She won’t go to bed till awfully late, but sits by the window telling her sorrow to the sea and the stars, and writing poems to the harbour-bar, that never moans that I know of. Luckily, as yet, it doesn’t show in her face that she has been burning the midnight oil, or candles. She burns three short fours a night sometimes that she buys herself. She has made three pounds altogether by writing poems that Mr. Aix puts in an American paper for her. She doesn’t let Simon know that she publishes, for it would discredit her in his eyes. He says there’s no harm in girls scribbling if they like, but he is jolly well glad his sister doesn’t.
Simon is proud of his sister Almeria, and thinks her a “splendid girl.” She lives at their place with her widowed father, eight miles inland, and only comes to Whitby when rough weather and wrecks are expected. Then every one walks up and down the pier, and hopes that a hapless barque will come drifting to their very feet. I don’t mean we actually want there to be a wreck, but if it has to be, it may as well be where one can see it. For Ariadne has a tender heart, and when Aunt Gerty put the loaf upside down on the trencher the other day, Ariadne at once kindly put it on its right end again, for a loaf upside down always betokens a wreck, and she knows all the superstitions there are.
The two piers here are so awkwardly placed that in rough weather the poor boats can’t always clear them. So it is a regular party on the pier when the South Cone is hoisted at the coastguard-station. Irene Lauderdale wears a little shawl over her head like a factory girl. It can’t blow away, she says. She has been photographed like that, with Lord Fylingdales. They say she is going to marry him, and do what Aunt Gerty refused to do.
I don’t know if they are a very united family, but certainly his sisters chaperon him most carefully, and have taken care to be great friends with Irene, so as to have an excuse for being always with her. Lord Fylingdales never gets a chance of seeing her alone. Dear Emily (Lady Fenton) and dear Louisa (Mrs. Hugh Gore) are devoted to dear Irene, and she thinks it is because she is so nice, so good form,not because she is so nasty. They perfectly loathe and detest her. I heard Lady Fenton abusing her to some one, talking in the same breath of Almeria Hermyre as “one of us.” The sisters would prefer Lord Fylingdales to marry his cousin Almeria, of course, but her get-up is simply appalling. She wears plain skirts and pea-shooter caps, and no fringe. George says she has the most uncompromising forehead he ever saw—afront candidewith a vengeance! I should think she soaps it well every morning, it looks like that.
Her father is about as queer as an old family can make him. I wish some one would tell me why if you came in with the Conqueror you are generally queer, or without a chin? Why do you always marry your near relations? Do you get queerer as you go on? No one ever answers these questions. Sir Frederick Hermyre has acres of stubbly chin, true, but he takes it out in queerness. He always wears white duck trousers, like the pictures of Wellington, whom he is rather like. He says “what is the good of being a gentleman if you can’t wear a shabby coat?” and does wear it. His house at Highsam is a show house, only they don’t show it. They are too careless, and too untidy, and too mean in the shape of housekeepers. One day some Whitby tourists went over to Saltergate in a break, and strolled up his drive to look at the Jacobean Front, and met Sir Frederick, as shabby as usual; he had been working in a stone quarry he has there, I believe.
“Did you wish to see me?” he asked the front tourist politely.
“Thanks, old cock, any extra charge?” said the tourist. It was of course all the fault of those old trousers and linen coat, and I have heard that Sir Frederick was not so very angry, and stood the man a glass of beer. He is a Liberal in spite of owning land. Simon is a Conservative. Eldest sons are always different politics to their fathers. We never see the old man hardly except on these stormy pier parties, and then he stalks up and down the pier with his daughter among us all, and though he isn’t exactly rude to anybody, he never seems to hear or care to hear what anybody is saying. Blood tells. Lady Scilly has given him up in disgust long ago; he simply answered her straight as long as he could, and when he didn’t understand her, he just shook his head and grinned and turned away.
Simon stood by, looking rather like a little whipped dog. He is awfully afraid of his father, who isn’t proud of him, but of Almeria, who he says has got all the brains of the family, and ought to have been the boy.
Simon tried introducing Ariadne to Almeria, but Ariadne’s fringe proved an insuperable barrier. As for Ariadne, Almeria’s naked forehead made her feel quite shy, she said, such a double-bedded kind of forehead as that needed covering. I said, all the same, she was an idiot not to make friends with Simon’s sister, for he had obviously a great respect for the girl’s opinion. She might have plenty ofsense in spite of her bald forehead and clumpers of boots! But it was no use, they stood glaring at each other like two Highland cattle, while Simon was trying to invent a mutual bond between them.
“My sister writes a little,” he said.
“Only for nothing in the Parish Magazine,” said Almeria, witheringly.
—“And goes about,” he went on, “with a hammer collecting——”
“Bedlamites and Amorites,” said I, to make them laugh.
They didn’t laugh, and Simon continued—
“And pebbling and mossing and growing sea anemones in basins.”
Then I got excited, and as Ariadne stood mum, I supported the conversation.
“And isn’t it funny to feel them claw your finger if you put it in their mouth—well, they are all mouth, aren’t they?”
“And stomach!” said Almeria, turning away politely.
Ariadne had hardly said a word, but had left the conversation to me. But any one could see that these two never could get on. Ariadne looked as she stood on the pier, plucking at bits of hair that would get loose, just like a pale butterfly caught in the rain, while Almeria stood as fast as a capstan and as stumpy. And the abominable thing was, that Almeria was not in the least rude. She was always civil, perfectly civil—but civility is thegreatest preserver of distances there is if people only knew.
Simon gave her up as far as Ariadne was concerned. He stuck to Ariadne, but did not neglect other girls or any one else for her sake, and so compromise her. He has got a lot of tact. Ariadne hasn’t any, but she is gentle and easily led, and Simon is the kind of boy who is going to grow masterful, and likes a girl who gives him the chance of standing up for her and managing for her. Perhaps he is a little bit sorry for her. Not because she is so dreadfully in love with him; he isn’t conceited enough to see that, or Ariadne would have shown him long ago. He is sorry for her because she gives herself away so in so many ways, looking pretty all the time. That is important, for it is no good looking pathetic, unless you look pretty as well. He chaffs her about her fluffy hats that go all limp in the salt sea-spray, and her pretty thin shoes that let the water in, and her hair that never will stay where she wants it. She has got into the way of continually arranging herself, patting a bow here, pulling her sleeves down over her wrist, and arranging her hair. “Always at work!” he says suddenly, and Ariadne’s guilty hands go down like clockwork. It isn’t rude, the way he says it. He looks at her kindly, not cheekily. It is that kind sort of fatherly look that I like, and that makes me think he is fond of Ariadne.