“My dear Miss Vero-Taylor,“Your interest in the study of folk-lore is highly commendable in one so young. The little mannikin—or rather womankin—is, as you aptly conjecture, a remnant of a custom dating from a period of the very remotest antiquity. In our Northumbrian villages it is the custom, the moment the sickle is laid down, for the villagers to dress the last sheaf in tawdry finery and carry it through the streets, finally when it presides at the Harvest, or Mell Supper, and the people dance round it singing:‘Blest be the day that Christ was born!We’ve getten Mell ofBall’scorn!It’s well bun’ and better shorn!Hip! Hip! Hurray!’“This custom was found, however, so prevocative of disorderly scenes that my revered predecessor here decreed that in future the Mell Doll (or Kern baby) should be simply placed on the altar-steps during Divine Service. Is it not wonderful to reflect that this grotesque image prefigures no less a personage than Ceres, the goddess of plenty, the Frigga of the Teutons, sometimes called Freia, Frey, conf. Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, passim—”
“My dear Miss Vero-Taylor,
“Your interest in the study of folk-lore is highly commendable in one so young. The little mannikin—or rather womankin—is, as you aptly conjecture, a remnant of a custom dating from a period of the very remotest antiquity. In our Northumbrian villages it is the custom, the moment the sickle is laid down, for the villagers to dress the last sheaf in tawdry finery and carry it through the streets, finally when it presides at the Harvest, or Mell Supper, and the people dance round it singing:
‘Blest be the day that Christ was born!We’ve getten Mell ofBall’scorn!It’s well bun’ and better shorn!Hip! Hip! Hurray!’
‘Blest be the day that Christ was born!We’ve getten Mell ofBall’scorn!It’s well bun’ and better shorn!Hip! Hip! Hurray!’
“This custom was found, however, so prevocative of disorderly scenes that my revered predecessor here decreed that in future the Mell Doll (or Kern baby) should be simply placed on the altar-steps during Divine Service. Is it not wonderful to reflect that this grotesque image prefigures no less a personage than Ceres, the goddess of plenty, the Frigga of the Teutons, sometimes called Freia, Frey, conf. Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, passim—”
“Oh yes, pass him, pass him!” said Peter impatiently, who won’t however let any one else make fun of the church, and scolded Christina for saying,
“Rather a come-down for a goddess, wasn’t it?”
“Well,” she remarked to Ariadne later on, “you had better be getting up your mythology” (meaningthe Bible, only Peter didn’t twig anything so wrapped up as this), “because you will be sure to be subpœna’d to take a class in the Sunday school after you have fished for it.Nemo Dodd impune lacessit!”
“Can’t Dodd lace his boots with impunity?” I asked Peter. I knew it wasn’t that, any more thanRes angusta domimeans “Please to keep Augusta at home,” and some others like that I have made.
Sure enough, Mr. Dodd made Ariadne take a class in his Sunday school, and Christina chuckled. It is the price of Mr. Dodd’s admiration, and he admired Ariadne very much. She is not really any happier for it, rather bored by it in fact. She spent three whole days getting up Sacred History for fear the school children, who have of course been properly brought up and grounded, should floor her, a poor feckless literary man’s daughter. Peter Ball gave her a little arithmetic. She got as far as Proportion with him. There was one sum about how many men it would take to build a wall of so many feet in so many hours. If it was Inverse Proportion, which it might be, and then again it mightn’t, you put the men under the wall and divide by the hours; as many of them as are left after such treatment is the answer. It came, stupidly enough, two-and-a-half, so I suggested to Ariadne, as I was helping her, to putTwo men and a boy. Peter said she didn’t repay teaching, and saw nothing to laugh at, though his wife seemed to.
Then Ariadne started an essay club with prizes.The Squire bought those for her in Morpeth when he went in to sell pelts and hides. Fancy touching his hand after that! They were bits of his poor beasts that he had killed! Billy Scott’s short essay on the elephant, “an animal with a leg at each corner and a tail at both ends,” was funny; and Sally Moscrop’s description of “any animal she liked to choose.” She invented “The Proc,” a beast with four legs, “two of whom are bigger and longer than the others, for the Proc lives all around a hill.” Grace Paterson’s essay was quite long. “The Pin is an exceedingly useful article. It has saved the lives of many men, many women and many children by not swallering of them.”
Grace is fourteen and the beauty of the village. She has begun a tale in ten chapters. She has to write it up in the apple-tree, for fear her father should “warm” her.
She and Ariadne were the two belles of the Ball in the Parish Room on Monday evening. They both danced with the Squire, who said he was in luck to get two literary ladies to dance with him on the same night. But Ariadne walked home with him, and I went with Christina. Mr. Rochester had one of his own roses Ariadne had given him back, in his button-hole. She is so unhappy about Simon that she doesn’t care who proposes to her. That is the way girls take it—a very selfish way, but they are selfish all through when they are in love. Ariadne actually thinks the Squire thinks he proposed to her going home that night. I don’t. It was pitch darkas we went home, the village is not lighted, and it is a very wicked village. She says, long arms like tentacles came groping out from the wall in the dark, and the Squire dragged her past them. As the village young men couldn’t see, they thought her one of their own sweethearts, for by then the party had broken up and was all over the place. The chucker-out had been very much occupied and had found the brook near the school-house door very handy.
But I don’t myself think the Squire did propose. He offered to take care of her, past the tentacles, but not for life. I think if a girl is always dreading proposals and thinking of how men will feel it when refused, proposals never come to them. That is what Christina said, and that Peter Ball took her entirely by surprise, when he asked her. I knew better, for I had chaperoned that affair. She says Peter wears very well, and that there’s some gilt left on the gingerbread still. The gramophone is still in all its glory, and when she was ill up-stairs, when Jim was born, Peter used to send up a message by the nurse for her to leave the door of her room open for half-an-hour before dinner, and then she would hear it. The nurse always forbade it, but Christina always insisted on it, to please Peter, and lay with her ears stopped up with sheet till the half hour was over. It is a new gramophone, not the one he had in Leinster Gardens. That shouted itself out, I suppose? Christina found an entry in his old pocket-book—
“July 19—a memorable year in my life. I bought a new gramophone and I got married. I won’t say anything about my wife here, but the gramophone was a beauty when she was new——“
Ariadne was disgusted. She doesn’t believe Simon would say such a coarse thing. Well, I wish she had some experience on the subject, what Simon would say, that’s all!
When Simon did come over to shoot, Ariadne hardly spoke to him during the three days he was here. No one did, much. He is so fearfully eligible that all the nice girls feel they must snub him, and he hardly gets a cup of tea. If Christina hadn’t known nice girls only, Ariadne would have had a better chance. What is the good of being a nice modest girl among other nice modest girls? And though Ariadne would not believe it, she did badly without her foil Lady Scilly, who showed up her niceness and made Simon draw comparisons. Then there was another adverse circumstance. The Squire came and followed Ariadne about with his eyes, till it really wasn’t safe to sit in a line with them both. That put Simon off. He is too nice to prefer a girl because another man is making himself unhappy about her.
Indeed Simon looked most uncomfortably serious and even sad. He has got his first wrinkle fixed between his eyebrows. He looks at Ariadne often, but in a puzzled sort of way, and takes himself up with a jerk, shaking his head, that the curls are cut off from too short to waggle.
“He cares for me—yes, he cares desperately,” said Ariadne one night, just as she was arranging her watch and her handkerchief on the chair beside our bed, and his photograph under her pillow. I have to take that away every morning lest the housemaid should see it and make fun of her. Ariadne forgets. We also arrange the strap of our box down the middle of the bed so that neither of us should encroach in the other’s part, and all these arrangements take time. Ariadne, though she is so gentle and so in love, always looks sharply to her rights, and more than her rights, and I generally find myself lying on the very rim of the bed. She is the eldest, unfortunately, and once she took the strap out of the bed to me when I objected.
“He loves me—oh, he does!” she moaned, “only he is not free.”
“He is in the power of a wicked witch, like the one who enchanted Jorinde and Joringel in Grimm!” I said, and tried to go to sleep and thought a little. Lady Scilly isn’t old, like the German witch, but I remember what the Ollendorff man said to me about her being a “fairy,” and I know there is some connection between them. Fairies are those who would do harm if they had the power; witches have the power, but only because they are old and don’t care for the things they cared for when they were young. Ariadne will never be a fairy when she grows up, she will always be too silly, and get put upon in society, though in private life she is quite up to her rights, and talks as loud as any one and doesn’t trouble to be die-away. Men never see that side of girls, mercifully they are able to keep it out of sight till they are at least married, and on the pig’s back, as Peter says. It is the unromantic things they are ashamed of. Ariadne wouldn’t mind Simon knowing she had appendicitis, but not for worlds that she had a corn on her foot and had to have it cut, or a chilblain, and it burst.
Presently she woke up and said, “Will any one tell me why a woman like that should be allowed to ruin his young life?”
“All young men have nine lives like a cat, there will be eight left for you to ruin, when you get him—but you never will.” I always add this not to raise false hopes. “And, goodness me, you can’t expect to get a young man all to yourself, as fresh and shining as a new pin!”
“Yes, I do!” said Ariadne crossly. “I want a safety-pin even. I am a new pin myself—I have never loved anybody but Simon, now have I?”
I didn’t answer that, but said I did wish we might turn over and go to sleep, when Christina rapped on the wall with a hairbrush and begged us to be quiet.
“Yes. All right! We will!” I yelled, and I certainly wouldn’t have said another word, but Ariadne began again, five minutes later.
“Tempe, why do these wretched married women—I’d be ashamed to be one—always want everybody at once? She has got Mr. Pawky, and——”
“Mr. Pawky is only for money,” I said. I wasnot going to tell her about her dear Simon paying Lady Scilly’s bills as well as poor Pawky.
“And Simon’s for love, then—oh dear! And George for literature. I am prettier than her, Tempe? Say I am—oh say I am, I want to hear you say it.”
“I won’t say it. You are far too conceited already.”
“That is the same as saying it,” answered Ariadne, and got calmer. “And at all events I am real, and that’s more than she can say. I don’t have to peel off my charms and put them away in a drawer like she has to.” (Ariadne is able to put her poems quite in grammar, but I suppose she thinks it unnecessary to be always at a stretch.)
“I don’t believe realness counts at all with young men,” I said. “I believe they really and truly enjoy kissing paint, and groping about the floor for pin curls when they’ve done, and powder on their shoulders when they go out into the street from calling.”
“Goodness!” cried Ariadne, almost shrieking, “you don’t suppose Simon ever went as far as kissing her? If I thought that, I’d——”
“What?”
“Never let him kiss me again. He hasn’t of course, yet! Oh, Tempe, I wish he had!”
“There you go!” I cried out, sick of her changeableness. “First you want him not to, then you wish he had. And the poor thing must kiss somebody—he’s got no mother, and kissing Almeriawould be like kissing a cactus or cuddling a porcupine. Do please keep to your own part of the bed, you don’t respect the strap a bit! I shall be on the floor in a minute. I’m lying right in the hem of the sheet now.”
Ariadne kindly made a little more room for me as I was patiently listening to her, and went on.
“Tempe, I have learned in three short seasons some of the bitter truths of so-called society——”
Just then, as any one could have foretold from the noise we were making, Christina walked right into the room.
“Will you two children be quiet! Why are you crying, Ariadne?”
Ariadne said she wasn’t crying, and at the same time asked Christina to be good enough, as she was up, to get her a clean pocket-handkerchief out of the drawer, one of those tied up with blue ribbon, not pink, for they are larger and plainer. Christina got it and then came and sat on my foot, which she could scarcely help doing, as I was only just but tumbling out of the bed altogether. She was exceedingly nice and sympathetic and agreed that Lady Scilly ought to put Simon back, for he was too little a fish for her to hook, being only twenty-four and she thirty-eight. She assured Ariadne, much as Mother used to assure me, that there were no ghosts—then if there aren’t, what are the white things one sees hanging about the doors of rooms?—that Simon didn’t really care for an old thing like that, and that if he did, her attraction must naturallywear out in the course of ages, and that Simon wouldn’t be so very old by the time that happened, and would know a nice girl when he saw one, with his unjaundiced eyes.
She also thought Ariadne should not put upon me so, and should give me a bigger piece of bed.
I was thinking all the time she was talking of George, and how Mother too as well as Ariadne was unhappy because of this evil fairy. I wished the Scilly motor-car might upset and spoil Lady Scilly a little sooner, and that Simon mightn’t be in it when that happened.
When Christina had tucked me in, and kissed us, and gone away, I made Ariadne make me a solemn promise that come what would, if she were ever married to Simon Hermyre, or indeed to any one else, that she would let all the others alone and not poach; for even if a young man seems unattached, you may be pretty sure there’s a girl worrying about him somewhere in the background. One woman, one man! That’s my motto, and indeed a woman now-a-days is lucky if she gets a whole man to herself as Christina has Peter, and well she knows when she is well off, and only laughs when her Peter says, as he did at breakfast, when she offered him Quaker Oats, “Woman, haven’t you learnt that my constitution clashes with cereals?”
Ariadne woke up with a plan, and after Simon had gone back to his friends at Henderland without proposing, and a hearty breakfast, we went outinto the village and bought sixpenny-worth of beeswax, and pinched it into the shape of a skinny woman like Lady Scilly as near as we could. Then we laid it in a drawer on one of Ariadne’s best silk ties, and we stuck a pin into it every day. I don’t know if it did Lady Scilly any harm, but it did Ariadne a great deal of good. She looked down the columns of theMorning Postevery day to see if Lady Scilly was ill, or perhaps even dead? When we left Rattenraw she gave the waxen image to Christina, and asked her to be good enough to finish up the boxful of best short whites on it. Christina promised faithfully that she would, and said that we might rely on her, as she had a little private spite of her own to work off on that lady. I knew what it was,i. e.Lady Scilly’s having tried to flirt with Peter, or at least Christina thinks that she did. Wives always think that only let them get into the same room with them, other women make a bee-line for their own particular dull husbands! Christina is nice, but she is just like another wife when it comes to preserving Peter.
The Squire saw us off, with an enormous bouquet, that we put under the seat, having started, and forgot. So did Ariadne forget the Squire. One can only hope that after a decent interval he will marry Grace Paterson.
She is a substantial farmer’s daughter, in spite of her thinking she can write. But she can wring a fowl’s neck, and make butter, two things that Ariadnenever would be able to do, the one from disgust and the other from native incompetence and a hot hand. As regards the Squire’s position, Grace is very nearly a lady, and he is very nearly not a gentleman, so it ought to turn out all right.
LADYSCILLYhas had three nervous chills this autumn, and one motor spill and a half, so I think that the sixpence was well spent on beeswax. Christina in her letter to us said that she had stuck the figure so full of pins that it had fallen apart, whereupon she had consumed the bits before a slow fire, muttering incantations the while. I asked her what she did say, afterwards, and she said that “Devil! Devil! Devil!” repeated quite steadily till it melted, seemed all that was necessary, and that the simplest, strongest incantations were the best.
Simon Hermyre comes here very often to call on Mother, whom he likes, if possible, better than Ariadne. He says that she is like Cigarette in a novel of Ouida’s. I believe Cigarette was a Vivandière. I suppose it is Mother’s neat figure makes him think of her as Cigarette. Simon adores Ouida, and Doré is his favourite artist. He has “that beautiful Pilate’s wife’s Dream” hung over his bed at home, he says. I always think it looks like a woman going down into her own coal-cellar and awfully afraid of beetles!
Christina came on to us for a few days after stayingwith her mother-in-law, and brought her sewing-machine, The Little Wanzer, and taught Ariadne and me to manage that wretched tension of which one hears so much. She nearly lockstitched one of my ears to the table, as I was learning with all my might, but it was worth it, and to Ariadne it was an advent.
Up to now, she has always thought she looked very nice in her bags with holes in them for the arms, and her twenty necklaces on at once, and her undescribable colours. Beautiful colours never seem to look quite clean, do you know? It is all very well for George, he is an author and not young, but young men like you to look fresh, and well-groomed, and above all to have a waist. Now a waist is not even allowed to be mentioned in our house. Mother left off hers, and her ear-rings too, at George’s request, when she married him, and as she never goes anywhere, she does not feel the want of them, but even when Ariadne was seventeen, Elizabeth Cawthorne said that it was time that she began to see about making herself a waist, and although George laughed Ariadne to death about it when she told him what the cook had said, yet it sank in, and I used to wake up in the grey winter mornings and find Ariadne sitting up in bed like a new sort of Penelope taking tucks in her stays, which Mother made her take out again in the daytime, knowing how George would disapprove of it.
Ariadne managed to “sneak” a waist, and George never noticed. That is the odd part of it; we allthink that that inch more or less makes such a difference, and we may be panting with uncomfortableness all the time, and to the outward eye look as thick as ever!
Ariadne’s figure is not her best point. Her hair is. It is well to find out one’s best points early in life and stick to them, as they say of friends. Ariadne trains hers day and night in the way it should go, but doesn’t want. I wonder it stands it, and doesn’t come out in self-defence! It is what they call Burne-Jones hair, like cocoanut fibre,Ithink, but Papa’s friends admire it, and she gets the reputation of being a beauty on it in our set.
But in Lady Scilly’s set, that is Simon’s set more or less, they think her a pretty girl, badly turned out!
“Ah, you are your father’s daughter, I see!” Christina said at once to her, when she caught her sewing a black boot-button on to her nightgown, because she couldn’t find a white one. I did not mention that I myself had begun to sew one of Ariadne’s iron pills on to my shoe, and only stopped because it didn’t seem to have any shank. But I was saying, we have all the trouble in the world to tidy up Ariadne before she goes down to the drawing-room to receive Simon when he calls. Ariadne comes out of her room half-dressed, and somebody catches her on the landing and buttons her frock, and perhaps the housemaid on the next floor points out to her that she hasn’t got on any waistband, and another in the hall sticks a pin in somewhere,that shines in the sun, when she gets into the drawing-room, and Simon puts his head on one side and looks at it fixedly.
“Dégagée, as usual!” he says in his bad French accent, and yet he was two years at a crammer’s to get him into the Foreign Office, and one in Germany to get polish, all before we knew him. He has got something better than polish, I think, and that is breeding. He is not the least shop-walkerish, and yet they have the best manners in the world. Simon says the most awful things, rude things, natural things, but how can one be angry with him, when he says them with his head on one side? Not Ariadne, certainly, and yet she can’t stand chaff as a general thing. Peter Ball could make her cry by crooking his little finger at her.
Simon has curly hair—not at all neat—which he can neither help nor disguise, though he forces Truefitt to shingle it like a convict’s so as to get rid of the curly ends, which are his greatest beauty, in mine and Ariadne’s estimation. “Can’t help it. Couldn’t bear to look like one of those chaps.”
He means the short-cuffed, long-haired, weepy-eyed men he meets here sometimes; not so often as before though, for George is revising his visiting-list. Ariadne hates them too, she hates everything artistic now. She can’t bear our ridiculous house, all entrances and vestibules, and no bedrooms and boudoirs to speak of. She laughs at the people who come to describe it and photograph it for the Artpapers, and wonders if they have any idea how uncomfortable it is inside, and how different from Highsam that Simon is always telling her about. As for Simon, he seems to think it rather a disgraceful thing to get into the papers at all, as bad as getting summoned in the police court. His father won’t let Highsam be done forRural Life, or lend Mary Queen of Scots’ cradle to the New Gallery. Mr. Frederick Cook offered to put Almeria’s portrait inThe Bitternwith her prize bull-dog, Caspar, but Almeria wrote him such a letter,almostrude, giving him her mind about interviewing. She has a mind on most subjects and never drifts. Simon has the greatest respect for her views. On stable matters certainly, I grant her that, but what can a country mouse, however high-toned, know of the troubles of town? Her father trusts her to go to Wrexham and buy the carriage horses, for he is no judge of the “festive gee” now, he says. Almeria likes art, too, and buys up all the Christmas numbers, and frames the pictures out of them and hangs them on the walls of Highsam Hall. Simon has borrowed her opinions on art, and dress too, and they aren’t the same as Ariadne’s.
“Great Scott!” he said to Ariadne, when she came down to see him one afternoon when he called, wearing her best new Medicean dress that George had specially designed for her. “If Almeria saw you in that frock, with your sleeves tied up with bootlaces! I do hope you won’t wear that absurd sort of fakement at my Aunt Meg’s on the twenty-fourth!If you do, I swear I won’t dance with you in it!”
Of course he didn’t mean it really, he would have danced with Ariadne in her chemise, out of chivalry and cheek, but still Ariadne took it seriously, and set to work to quite alter her style of dressing to please Simon. The invitations to Lady Islington’s dance had been sent out a whole month in advance, so you had to accept D.V. Ariadne had time to take a few lessons in scientific dressmaking, and then start on a ball-dress. Christina and I both helped her, for we are as keen on her marrying Simon as she is, and that is saying a good deal. We want her in a county family, not a Bohemian one.
Ariadne bought some grey and scarlet Japanese stuff that only cost ninepence-halfpenny a yard to make her ball-frock without consulting either of us. Christina saidQuem Deus vult—and that though you might look Japanese for ninepence-halfpenny a yard, you never could look smart. And it was quite true. Ariadne’s body was all over the place, with scientific seams meandering where they shouldn’t. When it was basted and tried on, she looked exactly like a bagpipe in it. We were working in the little entresol half-way up-stairs, and though there are three Empire mirrors in that room, you can’t see yourself in any one of them, so we had to tell her it didn’t do, and never would do.
“Take the beastly thing off then!” said Ariadne, almost crying, and pitching the body across the room till it lighted on Amelia’s head. (Amelia isthe dummy, and the only good figure in the house.) “I won’t wear anything at all!”
“And I daresay you will look just as nice like that!” I said to tease and console her, but she wouldn’t be, and she left the body clinging to Amelia, and began to put on her old blue bodice again, and it was a good thing she did, for the door opened and George and Lady Scilly came in.
“Dear me!” Lady Scilly said, in her little drawly voice, that comes of lying in bed late. “You look like Burne-Jones’Laus Veneris—‘all the maidens, sewing, lily-like a-row.’ I persuaded your father to bring me up to have a look at you. He says you are so clever, Ariadne, and make all your own dresses.”
So George had taken in that fact! I always thought he thought dresses grew, for he has certainly never been plagued with dressmakers’ bills.
“The eternal feminine, making the garment that expresses her,” said George.
“Ninepence-halfpenny isn’t going to express me!” Ariadne said, under her breath. “It covers me, and that’s all!”
“I always think,” George maundered, “that the symbolic note struck in the toilette is in the nature of a signal, a storm-signal if you will, of the prevailing wind of a woman’s mood. Her moods should be variable. She should be a violet wail one day, a peace-offering in blue the next, some mad scarlet incoherent thing another——”
“I don’t see how you are going to do all thaton ninepence-halfpenny,” Ariadne said again, for George was too busy listening to himself to listen to her impertinence. “Why you can’t even get the colour!”
“It is every woman’s duty to set an example of beautiful dressing without extravagance!” and he looked at Lady Scilly’s pretty pink fluffiness. Paris, of course. I hate Paris, where we never go.
“Oh, this,” she said very contemptuously, looking down at it as if it was dirt, as all well-dressed women do. “This! This cost nothing at all! I have a clever maid, you know?”
“If all the women had clever maids that say they have,” Christina whispered to me. “What would become of Camille, I wonder?”
George continued, inventing a hobby as he went on, “You must never quit an old dress merely because it has become unfashionable.”
“My dresses quit me,” said Ariadne, dipping her elbow in the ink-pot, so that the hole in it didn’t show. “I’m jealous of the sofa! It’s better covered than me.”
I believe Lady Scilly noticed her do this, and though she is lazy, she is kind, and she asked Ariadne when she intended to wear “this creation.”
“At Lady Islington’s,” Ariadne answered rather sulkily.
“Oh yes, I know. A Cinderella. It is far too good for that sort of romp, my dear child. I have a little thing at home I could lend you just to dance in—it is toodébutantishfor me, and I do wish someone would wear it for me. If I send it round, will you try it on? And if it will do, keep it, and wear it for my sake. When is the dance?”
“The day after to-morrow!” I answered for Ariadne, who was overcome with gratitude, for she knew what Lady Scilly’s little dresses were like. Camille’s “little” would beat Ariadne’s biggest.
“Then you shall have it to-morrow, and if you can wear it, do; I shall be so much obliged.”
Ariadne said “thank you,” a little ashamed to think that Simon was coming to tea, and that the only reason she cared about the dress was to dance with Simon in it; but I thought the settling of Ariadne in life, and marrying into a county family, was far more important than Lady Scilly’s little jealousies, and wanting to keep Simon to herself, when she got so many, including George, so I told Lady Scilly she was a brick and no mistake, and I really thought so.
But Christina thought Ariadne had better try to pull the first dress into some sort of shape, so that she could wear it if the other dress didn’t come. “Put not thy trust in smart women!” she said, and as it happened, she was right, for the dress never did!
At five o’clock on the very day of the dance, there wasn’t a sign of it, and Ariadne hadn’t let herself worry over it, by my and Christina’s advice. We told her that she had better keep all the looks she had to carry off the home-made dress, for it would require them. She didn’t worry, but she was veryangry with Lady Scilly, and anger made her eyes so bright, and gave her such a pretty colour, that I felt sure it would be all right. The dress wasn’t so very bad either; we had given up all attempt at getting it to fit, and that was better, for you could tell that Ariadne had a very nice, simple girlish figure underneath. Elizabeth Cawthorne came up to see her “girl” when she was dressed, she nearly always does, and she thought the dress sweet.
“That’ll get him, that’ll get him, Miss Ariadne, you’ll see!” she kept saying; it was very vulgar, but then, poor Ariadne was so much in love that she couldn’t help liking it. She had taken particular care of her hair, and when she lay down to rest in the afternoon, she had put ten curlers in to make sure of it’s looking nice. And it did, like Moses in the burning bush.
At nine she dressed and went, and Christina gave her a kiss for luck, and I went to bed, for it was quite ten o’clock. I was just jumping in (I always take a header off the chest of drawers to stop me getting stiff!) when I heard a great puffing and panting at the bedroom door. Elizabeth Cawthorne is getting fat. It goes with good-nature and beer. And she is learning to drop her h’s in the south.
“’Ere!” she said. “’Ere!” and shoved a great card-board box under my nose. “With Lady Scilly’s love and compliments.”
I was out of bed again in two twos, and Elizabeth and I unfastened the string, and there was a ball-dress—theball-dress!
I felt inclined to burst out crying, to think of poor Ariadne—so near and yet so far—dancing away, perhaps, and losing Simon Hermyre’s affection at every step, because her dress hung badly, and looked home-made, and here was a perfect dream of a dress, lying quite useless on the bed in my room at home. Elizabeth would have it out to look at; I indulged her, keeping her rather dark fingers off it as well as I could. It was all white, and fluffy, and like clotted cream, and I do believe it was made on purpose for Ariadne. There was a note with it, addressed to my sister, which Elizabeth opened in her excitement. I forgave her. It said—
“DEARCHILD,“My frock, I found, was not quite suitable, your young waist must be larger than mine. So I have ordered one to be made for you, and I do hope it will fit and that you will look very nice in it, with my love. I hope, too, that your father will approve of my taste.“Ever yours,“PAQUERETTESCILLY.”
“DEARCHILD,
“My frock, I found, was not quite suitable, your young waist must be larger than mine. So I have ordered one to be made for you, and I do hope it will fit and that you will look very nice in it, with my love. I hope, too, that your father will approve of my taste.
“Ever yours,“PAQUERETTESCILLY.”
“That’s all she cares about—that George should think her generous! But if she had wanted me or Ariadne to be grateful she should have managed to get it here in time. I don’t care for misplaced generosity.”
“Suppose, Miss,” said Elizabeth, “that you was to take a cab and go to where Miss Ariadne is, and make her change! Better late than never, I say.”
“My sister isn’t a music-hall artist,” I regret to say was what I answered, and Elizabeth agreed, and added too, that she hadn’t altogether lost her faith in the other dress, and that it might get Ariadne an offer as well as a smarter. So then she went, and I laid the dress out on Ariadne’s bed, and lay down, and tried to go to sleep with my eyes fixed on it, and I did and even dreamed.
I was woke by feeling a heavy weight on my chest. At first I thought it was indigestion, but as I began to get more awake, I found it was Ariadne, who was sitting there quite still in the dark. I joggled her off, and then I began to remember about the dress, but thought I would tease her a little first.
“Well, did you have a good time?” I asked her.
“Fairly,” answered Ariadne.
“Did you have any offers—in that home-made dress? Elizabeth was sure you would.”
“I believe I am all torn to bits?” said Ariadne, walking round and round her own train like a kitten round its tail, and not intending to take any notice of my question.
“Now don’t expect me to help you to mend it. It will take days!”
Ariadne said, “I shall not touch it. I don’t mean to wear it again, but hang it in a glass case and sit and look at it. It is a wonderful dress!”
“Don’t drivel!” I said, “unless there is really something particular about the dress that I don’t know.”
She didn’t even rise to that, so I said, “I wonder you don’t light up, and have a good look at it.”
“There is no hurry, is there, about lighting the candle?” Ariadne said, sitting plump down on a bureau, and looking as if she didn’t mean to go to bed at all. I believe she smelt Lady Scilly’s dress on her bed, and was keeping calm just to tease me.
“Did any one see you home?” I asked.
“Yes, some one did,” she answered, still in a sort of dream.
“Did he kiss you in the cab?” I at last asked her, thinking that if anything would rouse her, that would. She was sitting, as far as I could tell, in the cold moonlight, looking fixedly at her hand as if she wanted it to come out in spots like Saint Catherine Emmerich. I was riled to extinction.
“Oh, for Goodness’ sake, get to bed!” I cried. “And if you are going to undress in the dark, to hide your blushes, I should advise you to get into your bed veryverycarefully!”
That did it.
“You naughty girl,” she said quite quickly. “Have you been putting Lady Castlewood there with her new lot of kittens? It’s too bad of you!”
She lit the candle, and then I noticed that her ears were quite red. She saw the dress at the same instant and went across and fingered it.
“So you have come?” she said, talking to it as if it were a person. “You are rather pretty, I must say, but I have done very well without you.”
“Well,” said I, “youarecondescending. Who tore your skirt, if one might ask?”
“Mr. Hermyre.”
“Mister now! How intimate you have become to be afraid of his name! Ha! I believe she’s shy? How often did you dance withMisterHermyre?”
“Oh, don’t tease me, Tempe dear. As often as there was, I am afraid.”
“Afraid? Yes, you will be talked about, and he will have to marry you, there!”
“He is going to,” said Ariadne, quietly letting down her hair. I didn’t know my own Ariadne. She had turned cheeky in a single night!
I looked about for something to take her down with, and I found it.
“Did you—did you put your head on his shoulder when he had asked you, as we have always agreed you would?”
“I may have—I don’t know—I hope not!”
“You hope you didn’t, but you know you did! Well, I wonder it did not run into him, or put his eye out or something?”
“Beast, what do you mean?”
“Only that you have got a haircurler in your hair, near the left side, and I presume it has been there all the evening!”
Ariadne put out the light and came and sat on my bed after that, and told me all about it quite nicely.
As far as I could make out, Pique had begun it. There had been a slight difficulty with another manwho was not a gentleman although he was a Count—fancy, at Lady Islington’s?—and he had been rude to Ariadne about a dance, and Ariadne had appealed to Simon although he wasn’t so near her as some other men, and Simon had at once insulted the other man, and had danced with Ariadne all the rest of the evening to spite him and Lady Scilly, who had brought him, and whose new “mash” he was. I believe he’s the German chauffeur I saw in her car.
But Ariadne would have it that it was the fan business that had brought it on—that fan he gave her at Whitby he had broken at Whitby, and he had never bought her a new one. We had often talked about it, but of course never mentioned it to Simon.
Lady Islington is Simon’s Aunt Meg, and he is awfully afraid of her. After the row with the chauffeur Count, Ariadne had felt quite strange and frightened—he made nasty speeches, as not gentlemen do when they are riled—and Simon had taken her to a window-seat in a long gallery sort of staircase. She sat beside him for a long while feeling as if she could not breathe, long after all fear of the other man had passed away. She thought it could hardly be that still, and yet she felt as if a cold hand or a key, like when your nose is bleeding, was being put down her spine, though of course there was none. Simon didn’t say anything, he seemed to be thinking, but she dared not look at him for some reason or other. But she said she wished, as she sat there, more than anything else she had everwished in the world, more than she had wished I would get better of the scarlet fever when I was a baby—that he would take hold of her hand that was lying in her lap. She kept on staring at it, imagining his taking hold of it, “willing” him to do it. She wanted him to do this so badly that she nearly screamed and asked him right out; but no, it would have been no good unless he had done it of his own free-will. The music had not begun, and she seemed to fancy it would not begin until Simon had done that silly little thing. She felt somehow that he was thinking of this too, or something like it—something to do with her, at any rate.
She hated explaining all this to me, but I made her, for she had always solemnly promised to me she would tell me exactly how her first offer took place.
Then the music began and the people on the stairs got up, and some of them were sure to come past where they were. She says she felt Simon take a resolution of some kind, and yet all he said was, “Have you got a fan?”
Ariadne didn’t know in the least what he meant, but she knew it was all part of the thing that had to happen now, and at once answered quite truly—
“I haven’t got one. You broke it.”
“And didn’t I give you a new one? What an objectionable brute I am! Well, then we must do without. I only hope my Aunt Meg doesn’t see me?”
And he kissed her.
This was the strangest way for it to happen, as Ariadne and I agreed, quite different from all our plans and expectations. For of course he then told her he loved her, and wanted to marry her. It was very nearly all at the same time, but yet he kissed her first. Nothing can alter that fact, and it was in the wrong order, and so I shall always say, except that Ariadne has made me promise never to allude to it again. And of course, as she kept her promise, I shall keep mine.
Simon Nevill Hermyre and Ariadne Florentina Vero-Taylor are to be married in three months at latest, they settled it that very night, subject to parents. Sir Frederick may raise objections, but Ariadne was able to assure Simon that George won’t, he doesn’t care about keeping Ariadne a day longer than he needs to. As Mr. Simon Hermyre’sfiancéeshe is only an encumbrance now, not an advertisement, for of course Simon won’t let her do Bohemian things or dress queerly any more. And she is and will be as dull as ditch-water for at least a year, like all engaged girls. She bores me.
DEARSimon let his hair grow comparatively long to be married to Ariadne in, to please me. I was chief bridesmaid, and stood next Almeria; Jane Emerson Tree was third bridesmaid, and behaved fairly well, though I am told she did bite off and eat the heads of the best flowers in her bouquet while the service was going on, and Jessie Hitchings, who stood next her, couldn’t prevent it, for she hadn’t a single pin on her she could get at. I expect Jane Emerson was very ill after all that stephanotis! I treated her with studied contempt, and only asked her what she thought of Ariadne’s “waist” this time, and didn’t she wish she could have one as above reproach when she was married, if she ever found time to get married between her great actings? Why, Ariadne’s dress was made by Camille! I was as intimate as possible with Jessie Hitchings, the coal-agent’s daughter from Isleworth. That did Jane Emerson good. Ariadne asked her to be one of her bridesmaids just to please Ben, who adores her, and doesn’t see that she is a bit common. Men in love never do. Still, she is our only childhood’s friend, so Simon and even Almeria didn’t make theleast objection to have her included in the procession. They are not snobs, and if they were, are high up enough to be able to afford to stoop, and know everybody. As for Almeria, she came out wonderfully, and I really don’t mind her at all. As the bridesmaids’ hat wouldn’t set without a bank of hair or something on the forehead for it to rest on, she was sensible enough to buy a pin-curl at the Stores and stick it on under the brim for the occasion. Ariadne was very much softened towards her by that, and I promised to go and stay with her at Highsam later on and learn to ride.
George gave Ariadne his usual present, only more so—a set of his own works beautifully bound, and some of the old jewellery she has always had given out to her to wear, to take away for her very own. Mother gave her all her household linen, marked and embroidered by herself. Peter Ball gave her a gramophone, Christina a type-writer. The Squire gave her his mother’s best salad-bowl. Lord Scilly gave her a great gold cup or beaker. I believe he was trying to atone for the low joke he had practised on her at the picnic. It was awfully good and valuable, Simon said. Lady Scilly gave her a Shakespeare bound in calf. I believe she meant a hint about calf love, just the kind of thing she would call a joke, and thatPunchwouldn’t put in; but Ariadne never noticed and was grateful, for she happens to like Shakespeare for himself. To Simon, I heard, Lady Scilly gave a queer sort of scarf or thumb ring, with the Latin wordDonecengravedon it. I did not know what that meant, and Simon said he was blest if he did, and he hung it on his dog’s collar afterwards.
Simon and Ariadne went to Venice for their honeymoon. She took note-books, etc., but could not write any poetry in Venice somehow, so shopped all the time, especially bead necklaces. She didn’t care for her own hair any more when she came back, she said every other girl in Venice had it. She had put back her fringe, and wets it every morning to make it keep flat, to please Sir Frederick Hermyre and Simon, who owned,aftermarriage, to a weakness for smooth hair.
They are to live in Yorkshire at one of his father’s six places. He has given it to Simon, and Simon is now the youngest J.P. on the bench, and is going to breed shorthorns. I am to go and stay there after Christmas.
George detests Christmas so much that he ignores it, and forces us all to do the same. We may not put up holly or mistletoe, or make a plum-pudding or mince-pies. We have mince-pies always at Midsummer, and plum-pudding on May Day, so one does not miss them altogether, but all the same, I have a sort of Christmas feeling come over me at the right time, and could enjoy a Christmas stocking or Santa Claus as much as any ordinary Philistine child. So could Mother. Elizabeth says it is all she can do not to give warning than stay in such a God-forgotten house over the time, and she makes a small plum-pudding for the kitchen andgets us all down, except George, to stir it on the sly. Up-stairs no one dares to mention Christmas. If we do, we are fined sixpence. We have all of us to pay a whole shilling if a pipe bursts? I don’t know if George would insist on money down, if it happened, but it is an odd circumstance, that though of course if they do burst, it is nobody’s fault but the plumber’s, who came to put them right last time and carefully left something wrong ready for the next, now that this rule has been made the pipes contain themselves, and don’t burst at all.
When Ariadne was here, she always contrived to send away a few parcels, and we received some, of course. We cannot help people, who respect Christmas, being kind to us then. George came in once while we were undoing a few, and damned “this whirling season of string and brown paper!”
“I resent the maddening appeals of an over-wrought post-office to post early. Why should I post early? Why should I post at all? I forbid all mention of the egregious subject!”
And he went out, and we asked Elizabeth to bring our parcels up to our bedrooms in future.
The Christmas after Ariadne left us, we didn’t mind obeying him, we were so sad without her. I missed having some one to bully. George missed having two to bully instead of one. He has always sworn, but now he took to swearing as if he meant it, and saying bitter things to Mother, and poor Ben’s chances of school are farther off than ever. He got quite desperate, did poor Ben, and asked Motherto make some arrangement by which she could give him less to eat and put what she could save aside for his schooling. He said he was willing to live on skilly if only he might go to school, and from what he heard, he wouldn’t get much better there, so he might as well get used to it. Mother cried, and said no, she couldn’t save off his keep, that she must make a man of him at any rate, and would try to save money some other way, or even make it? She would think till she thought of a plan. Meantime she would buy him some books, and Mr. Aix would look over his exercises if Ben went regularly to his rooms in Pump Court. Ben tried, but it is so awkward for him, since he started valeting George at Whitby. George can’t do without him, and calls for him at all sorts of times, and Ben must be at call. George swears at his sulky expression while folding up coats, stretching trousers, etc., but I am afraid Ben will have the melancholia soon if he doesn’t get what he has set his heart on. If Mother could only raise the money, she says she would go straight to George with it, and tell him that she meant to pay the cost of Ben’s education, for it is money, she is sure, and nothing but money, which prevents his making up his mind which school? Gracious me! Schools are all alike, all beastly, and a necessary evil for the sons of men.
I often wonder if the people he goes among, and stays with—“he is the devil for country houses!” Mr. Aix says, “he has got them in the blood,”—I wonder if when they see him come smiling down tobreakfast—he has to come down to breakfast in some houses, never at home—they realize that he has a wife and children and a secretary, and three cats depending on him? For I believe he is the kind of useful guest who has small talk for breakfast, which reminds me of those houses where the cook gets up early to bake the little hot cakes people like, and what it means to her, no one imagines! George stokes and talks at the same time, and that is one reason why they all love him and ask him madly for Saturdays to Mondays or longer.
George is not well just now, his voice is all in his throat, and husky. His hair is getting very grey, and suits him; his eyes are large, like a sad deer’s. He is still as graceful. Mr. Aix says he has taken to wearing stays. I don’t believe this. I am the only one in the house who sticks up for George. Ben hates him, so does Aunt Gerty. Ben will go on hating him till he is allowed to go to school. Mother never speaks of him, so I don’t know how she feels about him. In cold weather he is always much nicer to her. He feels the cold of England. He has written about Italy till he is half Italian. He has got a new secretary, a “singularly colourless personage,” whom Mother likes very much. She isn’t half so amusing as Christina, but Lady Scilly says she is far more suitable.
After Christmas was over, George left us and went to “The Hutch,” Lady Scilly’s place in Wiltshire. Her novel is nearly finished, and Ben says she has piped all hands on deck—I mean all the people whoare helping her have to be ready with their help. There is a lawyer and a doctor among the crew, but George is master-skipper. I believe that she will drop them all when once the book is done? George too, perhaps. Though I am not sure she likes him only for the sake of the novel? He can be fascinating when he likes, and he does like with her. It’s such a good old title.
I think I am right, for he was away a long time, indeed he has never stayed so long at “The Hutch” before. He has his own suite there, and all the other rooms are called after the names of his novels or characters in them. Could any one pay an author a greater compliment?
Mrs. Ptomaine was not staying there—Never no more!—but she has a lady friend who was, and the friend says Lord Scilly is beginning to get “restive.”
Mrs. Ptomaine comes to see us, at least to see Aunt Gerty, a good deal; she is no longer all in all with Lady Scilly since the Mr. Pawky episode.
“And I didn’t make much of him, after all!” she told Mother and Aunt Gerty. “Lady Scilly had squeezed him nearly dry. He didn’t trust women any more, always imagined they wanted money. And then dangled an empty purse at them, metaphorically. Poor old man, it is a shame to destroy any one—even a millionaire’s—confidence in human nature. She borrows of every one, even the masseuse and the charwoman, my dear, it’s quite awful! That poor, pretty young Hermyre! I was quite pleased when your sweet innocent daughter rescuedhim from the wiles of Scilly, and perhaps Charybdis—who knows? He looked weak!”
“And so secured a weak child to look after him and strengthen his hands!” said Mother. It is no use minding Mrs. Tommy, she isn’t “quite eighteen carat,” Aunt Gerty says, or else she would surely not discuss a woman’s own son-in-law to her face. But, she is a journalist, and journalists know no laws of consanguinity or decency even. If one is to get any good whatever out of the press, one must accept it with all its inconveniences, and Aunt Gerty and Mother think everything of the press in these days. They ask Mrs. Ptomaine to dinner continually, and Mr. Freddy Cook to meet her. And Mr. Aix as a standing dish, and Aunt Gerty of course. Then they make a lot of noise and smoke all over the house except the study. Mother won’t let them go in there at all while George is away. I hear them talking between the puffs—
“You can engage to work so and so, eh?” or “Have you got thingumbob?”
Mr. Aix is writing a play. He brings the acts over here as he writes them, and gets Mother to speak the woman’s part for him, so that he sees how it goes. He says Mother is a great dear, and he tells her continually how she helps him, how she puts the right interpretation on him at every turn. I never should have thought Mr. Aix difficult to understand, but then a man has to be very modest to realize that he takes no understanding and is as plain as a pike-staff. And as Mr. Aix always speaksthe brutal truth—he can’t wrap anything up—he is as “crude as the day,” so George often says—I don’t see Mother’s cleverness.
They talk of The Play as if it was a baby. “Mustn’t christen it before it is brought into the world,” and “One thing you can confidently predict about it, it can’t be born prematurely!” and so on. They use the study in the mornings, and Mr. Aix sits in George’s swivel-chair, and Mother takes the floor in front of him. She reads the woman’s part out aloud and he criticises her. She must do it pretty well, for he often calls out, “Oh, you darling!” when she has said a particular piece. “What a divine accent you give it!” “That will knock them!” “Wicked to hide such a talent!” and praise like that. He never asks Aunt Gerty to read any, though she is a real actress and sits there and criticises Mother all the time.
“Pooh, pooh!” says Mr. Aix, “leave her to her intuitions! You battered professionals don’t know the value of a new note.”
So I see that Mother never was a Professional, even before George married her. And a good thing too!
Mr. Aix worked very hard at the play, and promised that it should be finished one day next week. When George came home, he would want his study of course, but we hadn’t the remotest idea of his arriving when he did, late one afternoon just before dinner-time.
We were all hard at it in the study. Aunt Gerty was making a pink surah blouse all over the studytable and being prompter as well. Mr. Aix was in George’s swivel-chair, and Mother standing in front of him. George was on us in a moment, just as Mr. Aix had closed the manuscript with a slap.
“Our child comes on bravely!” he was just saying to Mother, as George appeared in the doorway with his cigarette in his mouth.
Aunt Gerty whispered to Mother, “I’ll bet you Lord Scilly has had him kicked out of the house. Go on that tack!” and bolted into the hall, forgetting her pink surah spread all over the desk.
“Welcome back, old fellow!” said Mr. Aix, turning round in the swivel-chair and putting a protecting paw over Aunt Gerty’s blouseries. They would be sure to irritate George, he knew; so they did. George turned quite white with temper and flung his coat off, and Mother caught it across her arm as if she had been a servant. There seemed to be a great noise in the hall, and Polly came in looking disgusted, as servants always do when it is a question of not paying one’s just debts.
She began “If you please, sir, the cabman——” but her voice was quite drowned between the cabman relieving his mind in the hall outside and George inside. He seemed bewildered, but able to swear all the time.
“Won’t you pay your cab, George?” said Mother gently, “and then you can abuse me at your leisure!”
Mr. Aix went to pay the man, and I thought I had better get out of the room with him. Georgewas sitting bolt upright in his chair, and Mother like a little school-girl before him. I don’t know what they said to each other, but George wouldn’t come out to dinner, but had a plate sent in.
Mother didn’t alter her habits, but went to the theatre with Mr Aix.
George’s plate of dinner came out untouched. After all it was my own father, and he had come all the way from Wiltshire, and perhaps had been kicked out of “The Hutch” as Aunt Gerty said. I knew enough of Lady Scilly to know how changeable she is, and perhaps it was only her novel she cared for. I went to him, as bold as a lion.
He was sitting still where he had been before dinner, only his head was on his hands among Aunt Gerty’s blouse trimmings.
“Shall I take these away?” I asked. “Don’t they make you angry?”
“I haven’t noticed.”
I saw he was ill, not to mind all Aunt Gerty’s horrid pink shape all over his papers! I sat down on the edge of the table and he didn’t even scold me.
“Where is Lucy—my wife?” he asked me presently.
“My Mother?” said I. “She’s gone to the theatre.”
“Is that usual?”
“Quite usual. She generally goes with Mr. Aix, but to-night Aunt Gerty has gone with them.”
“Chaperons them, eh?”
I didn’t like to hear him call Mother and Mr. Aixthemin that insulting bracketting way, so I said—
“Mother has stayed in all her life. She wanted a change.”
“Aix?” said he, “for a change! God!”
“She’s collaborating with Mr. Aix.”
“Damn him and his play too.”
“Oh, not his play, George. Mother would besogrieved.”
Then George suddenly pulled a paper out of his pocket and said, “Read that aloud, child.”
“Is it a bit of your new novel?”
“Yes, it is a bit of my new novel. Read.”
I did.
“We talk and talk, and never act. Oh, this curse of civilization! You make excuses for S——, for your bitter enemy. Magnanimous, but effete! He is behaving well, but so unpicturesquely. He offers a woman no excuse for staying with him. Oh, Italy! Italy! You, magician, have made me long for the life of Italy, the silver incandescent sands, the passionate brown of the olives—but why should I try to outdo you in your own imitable manner?”
“Inimitable, you mean, don’t you, child? But no, we will not trust this white devil of Italy. Go and fetch me a plateful of cold meat. And here are the keys; go down to the cellar and get a bottle of Burgundy. Corton eighty-eight. You’ll see the label. We will carouse.”
I was delighted. George and I finished the bottlebetween us, and he ate a good supper, and said no more of Mr. Aix, or Mother either.
I almost liked George just then. I saw why Lady Scilly liked him. He is funny and gentle. I asked him to choose a school for Ben, and he said he would think about it. It is the oddest feeling to suddenly become “pals” with one’s own father. I had never known it before. There is some good in George, and his eyes are very bright.
MYmother is changed—not horrid, but quite changed. She goes out nearly every morning at ten, with Aunt Gerty, whose manners are worse than ever, and who has a little chuckling, cheerful way of going about that simply irritates me to death! There is a secret, evidently, and George and I are out of it. It brings us together. He is not happy, no more than I am, no more than Mother is. She is excited, not happy. She has taken to wearing her mouth shut lately; once we used to tease her because she kept it open, and looked always just as if she were going to speak, or had done speaking. But Mother is a good woman. Although she gads about so much, she doesn’t neglect her household duties. She sees after George’s comfort as much as ever, and keeps all onions out of the house as usual. The more she fusses over him, the less he likes it. He shook his head once, when Mother had tidied his writing-table for him—it took her two hours—and then he said half-laughing, “A bad sign, Tempe! Read your Balzac.”
I don’t read Balzac, and I don’t know what George means. I don’t try, and I find that is the best sortof sympathy one can give. At any rate, he likes it, and he is always having me in his study, and teaching me to type-write, and saying little things, like that I have put down, under his breath. He mutters a good deal to himself, not to me, and wants not so much some one to talk to, as some one to talk at.
We hear no more of Lady Scilly. She has not been here since Ariadne was married. Ariadne was an excuse. Mother never gave her an excuse to come to see her, she had never accepted her, or been rude to her either. She simply ignored her. So Lady Scilly not having Ariadne to come and fetch, had no particular reason for coming to us, unless she came to see George, and she could have seen him more easily at “The Hutch” or her town-house, till quite recently. She used to come here about her novel, but most uncomfortably, for Christina was a sad dragon, and looked down her nose at her. Christina could curl her nostril really, which very few women can do. It is a horrid thing to have done at you, and withers you soonest of anything. Now the novel is finished, and the type-written copy, tied up like Christmas meat, is going the social round of all the literary men who have been asked to her dinner-parties with a view to their favourable opinion. I know that Mr. Frederick Cook has had it, and written her a polite letter about it, though that won’t prevent him slating it inThe Bitternif he wants to. So Mrs. Ptomaine says.
I know that what Aunt Gerty said in spite, and to give Mother a stick to hit George back with whenhe came and found us doing dressmaking in his sacred study, was true. Lord Scilly had told George not to go to his house any more. Perhaps Lady Scilly had said he might? Having no more use for George, she may have given Lord Scilly a free hand with him, and perhaps a free foot, who knows? I think she is not nice. I am on George’s side now, as far as outside politics go, though I shall never approve of the way he treats my brother Benvenuto.
Lady Scilly came to Cinque Cento House at last, and George didn’t “look that pleased to see her,” as Elizabeth Cawthorne said afterwards. Elizabeth Cawthorne has no opinion of her, nor of the way she goes on with that German fellow. She means the man who was so rude to Ariadne at the Islingtons’, at least he was far too kind for politeness. He was a Count then, but he is also Lady Scilly’s chauffeur. He was waiting outside on her motor at this very moment, quite the servant. She took him to her aunt’s ball for the fun of it, I suppose, and it was easy to pretend he was somebody, for he looks quite military and distinguished.
Elizabeth showed her into the study, saying gruffly, “A female to see you, sir.”
“Paquerette!” said George, in real amazement, as she floated in, and when the door had closed on Elizabeth Cawthorne, went a little down on one knee and looked up into George’s face, saying, as I have heard the French do to their professors of painting or music,—“Cher maître!”
George had taught her to do this in the dayswhen he was really her professor, and she wanted to do everything as Bohemians do in the Quartier Latin, but only the way she looked at him as she said it I could tell that she had no further use for him.
I was sitting at the type-writer, in the corner of the room, as if I were in my castle, and I stayed there. It was getting dark and they didn’t think of turning on the electric light. Besides, George had at first made me a little sign which I understood, because of theentente cordialewe had had for some time, to stay where I was, and I like doing what people seem to want, especially when it goes with what I want myself. Then he forgot me altogether. Lady Scilly, I believe, never saw me at all, for she never said how-do-you-do, or looked my way, and yet we had not quarrelled. George put on his “pretty woman” manner, and raised her, and made her sit in a nice high-backed chair that suited her.
“How nice of you to come! My wife is out. By the way, I may as well tell you, she is leaving me.”
I nearly fell off my chair. Lady Scilly looked upset; for she hadn’t come to see Mother, and hadn’t thought of asking whether she was out or not. She collected herself, and said to George with some dignity—
“You put it crudely.”
“I do. I never mince my words, except in books. It is as I say. I shall not oppose it. I hope that my unhappy partner may one day come to knowthe bourgeois happiness I have been unable to give her. Unlucky fellow that I am—cœur de célibat, you know; an Alastor of Fitz John’s Avenue, the Villon of Maresfield Gardens——”
“No woman’s such a fool as to leave a place like this——”
“What does Shelley say?Love first leaves the well-built nest——”
“You certainly are a most extraordinary man!” she mumbled. George puzzled her by changing about so.
“Yes,” he answered her, smiling. “Come, take off your furs and make yourself at home. Compromise yourself merrily. I suppose now, by all the rights and wrongs of it, I ought to invite you to bolt with me, but I am weak, I shall not.”
“Are you quite sure you won’t be stronger by the end of this interview?”
“Oh, is this an interview? Ah, why be formal and boring? Why stable the steed after the horse—I mean the novel is out? It will be a huge success, so your enemies predict. Frederick Cook ofThe Bitternwrites me that this, the latest output of a militant aristocracy, seeking to beat us with our own weapons, is chockful of cleverness and primitive woman. What more do you want?”
“D. the novel! I wantyou!” she said, stamping her foot.
“Oh, throw away the fugitive husk and the rind outworn—the creed forgotten—the deed forborne—how does it go? Give a poor author a chance, nowthat you have sucked his commonplace book dry, and torn the heart out of his theories, butchered him to make a literary agent’s holiday.”
“Youareunkind.”
“Don’t say that. It is unworthy of you. Stale! like the plot of the new novel you propose we should work out together.”
“I am prepared to go all lengths to assert——”
“Your powers of imagination. I don’t doubt it. But I have been thinking it over, and I find it a ghastly, an impossible plot. No, it would never do, not even if we made a motor-motif of it. It won’t go on all fours. It would not even begin to sell. It has none of the elements of popularity. To begin and end with, there’s not an atom of passion about it, not even so much as would lie on twenty thousand pounds of radium, and you know how much that is!”
“Don’t imply that I am incapable of passion in that insulting way!” she said quite angrily. “It shall never be said——”
“It will never be said, unless we run away and apply the test of Boulogne and social ostracism. Believe me, Paquerette, things are best as they are—going to be. There’s true evolution in it. When the feast is over, you put out the fluttering candles, tear down the wreaths, open the windows. When the novel is done——”
“I hate you to talk like this!” said she, making a cross face.
“Women hate realism.”
“Women hate lukewarmness. Pull yourself together, George, and let us lay our heads together to make Scilly—look silly. He’s mad just now, but it will pass off, he will get over it, and you will come down to us at ‘The Hutch’ as usual and more so. Dear old Scilly will be the first to climb down——”
George shook his head.
“No, no,non bis in idem. Not twice in the same place.” (I wasn’t sure if he was alluding to the kick Lord Scilly had given him or not.) “Go now, you sweet woman. I want to be alone. You are staid for.”
“Yes, yes, I must go. You remind me. The Count will be so deliciously irritated. Thanks so much, so very, very much, for all your help and timely assistance, your——”
“Has the play been worth the scandal?” George asked her, while he was kissing her hand to hide how much he loathed her, and was glad she was going. He knew, as well as I knew, that she was the kind of woman who kicks away the ladder she has just got up by with a toss of her fairy foot, and that he would never be asked to “The Hutch” again. Mr. Aix would, more probably, because he may chance to review what George has helped her to write. And it seemed to me that she has been massaged so much or so long or something, that her cheeks are like flabby oysters, and her figure brought out in all the wrong places. She was too pretty to last kittenish and fluffy as she was when I saw her come out of the public-house that first day.
“Good-bye—then—George!” she said, with something between a sneer and a sob. “We meet again—in society, not under the clock at Charing Cross.”
What should take George and her there I cannot imagine, but George bowed, and led her out, and I followed them. There was her chauffeur in the car as large as life—and as a German. Though indeed he is very good-looking.
“I can see that he is cross in every line of his back,” Lady Scilly whispered to George as she left him on the steps, and tripped down them, and got in beside her crabstick Count. He received her most coldly, and it was easy to see he was her master more than her servant.
George grunted as he fastened the door. There was an east wind blowing, and he was afraid of catching cold after standing there bareheaded.
“She will probably bolt with him before the year is out,” he said, as we went back to the study shivering. He played cat’s-cradle with me till dinner-time. It was all he was good for, he said, and as the game appeared to amuse him, I didn’t mind making a fool of myself for once.
About Mother’s going away that he spoke of to Lady Scilly! I believe it really is with Mr. Aix, as George is so very civil to him. I don’t see who else it could be, for we see more of him than of any one else. He is George’s greatest friend, as well as Mother’s, and people don’t run away with perfect strangers, as a rule.
Mother was certainly up to something, for hereyes were as bright as glass, and she had hysterics two days running. Aunt Gerty used to say while these were going on, slapping Mother’s palms and vinaigretting her—“It is natural, you know—the excitement.” The excitement of running away, I suppose. She used to make her lie down a great deal, and “nurse her energy,” for she “would want it all!” Mother was by far the most important person in the whole house in these days, and instead of George being out late, and needing his latch-key, it was Mother who was always on the go, and dining with the Press every other night of her life. At least, I suppose Mrs. Ptomaine and Mr. Freddy Cook are the Press, they are certainly nothing else of importance. Mother joined a club, and stayed there one night when there was a fog.
George never asks her any questions. He is too proud, and of course he knows that she is too. She wouldn’t stand having her movements questioned, any more than he would. But he began to look ragged and grey, and to have indigestion. He lived chiefly in his study. He fenced a good deal, with Mr. Aix. He asked Mr. Aix to leave the button off his foil, but Mr. Aix would not. George’s other distraction is Father Mack, who comes to see him a good deal, and when George goes out now, which he seldom does, it is to see Father Mack. Father Mack is not oppressively stiff. Once George came back from confession and set us all to try and translate “The Survival of the Fittest” into French, a problem Father Mack had asked him. Father Mackalso gave Mother the address of a very good little dressmaker. He lent George theLife of Saint Catherine Emmerich, a lovely book. She was one of those women who can think so hard of something that it comes out all over their bodies, in spots. People came from far and wide to look at her and admire her, and her family allowed it, instead of getting a trained nurse at five-and-twenty shillings a week, and giving her a free hand till Catherine was cured. It is my belief that she did not want to be cured, she liked being praised for having so many spots that you could fancy it was all in the shape of a crown of thorns. Still it is a nice romantic story, and the poor woman meant well.