[Image unavailalbe.]The Sea-Green Incorruptible.
The Sea-Green Incorruptible.
The Sea-Green Incorruptible.
any chance passer-by who knew her by sight would be aware that she was behaving as befitted Constance Lady Whittlemere. Opposite her, not by her side, sat poor Miss Lyall, ready with a parasol or a fur boa or a cape or something in case her patroness felt cold, while on the box beside Brendon the coachman sat the other footman, who had not been out round and round and round the Park in the morning, and so in the afternoon went down Piccadilly and up Regent Street and through Portland Place and round and round Regent’s Park, and looked on to the back of the two fat lolloping horses which also had not been out that morning. There they all went, the horses and Brendon and William and Miss Lyall in attendance on Constance Lady Whittlemere, as dreary and pompous and expensive and joyless a carriage-load as could be seen in all London, with the exception, possibly, of Black Maria.
They returned home in time for Miss Lyall to skim through the evening paper aloud, and then had the tea with the cakes and the scones from the still-room. After tea Miss Lyall read for two hours some book from the circulating library, while Lady Whittlemere did wool work. These gloomy tapestries were made into screensand chair-seats and cushions, and annually one (the one begun in the middle of November) was solemnly presented to Miss Lyall on the day that Lady Whittlemere went out of town for Christmas. And annually she said:
“Oh, thank you, Lady Whittlemere; is it really for me?”
It was: and she was permitted to have it mounted as she chose at her own expense.
At 7.15P.M.a sonorous gong echoed through the house; Miss Lyall finished the sentence she was reading, and Lady Whittlemere put her needle into her work, and said it was time to dress. At dinner, though both were teetotallers, wine was offered them by the butler, and they both refused it, and course after course was presented to them by the two footmen in white stockings and Whittlemere livery and cotton gloves. Port also was put on the table with dessert, this being the bottle which had been opened at the last dinner-party, and when Lady Whittlemere had eaten a gingerbread and drunk half a glass of water they went, not into the morning-room which they had used during the day, but the large drawing-room upstairs with the Louis Seize furniture and the cut-glass chandeliers. Every evening it was all ablaze with lights,and the fire roared up the chimney: the tables were bright with flowers, and rows of chairs were set against the wall. Majestically Lady Whittlemere marches into it, followed by Miss Lyall, and there she plays patience till 10.30 while Miss Lyall looks on with sycophantic congratulations at her success, and murmured sympathy if the cards are unkind. At 10.30 Branksome the butler throws open the door and a footman brings in a tray of lemonade and biscuits. This refreshment is invariably refused by both ladies, and at eleven the house is dark.
Now the foregoing catalogue of events accurately describes Lady Whittlemere’s day, and in it is comprised the sum of the material that makes up her mental life. But it is all enacted in front of the background that she is Lady Whittlemere. The sight of the London streets, with their million comedies and tragedies, arouses in her no sympathetic or human current: all she knows is that Lady Whittlemere is driving down Piccadilly. When the almond blossom comes out in Regent’s Park, and the grass is yellow with the flowering of the spring bulbs, her heart never dances with the daffodils; all that happens is that Lady Whittlemere sees that they are there. Shesubscribes to no charities, for she is aware that her husband left her this ample jointure for herself, and she spends such part of it as she does not save on herself, on her food and her house and her horses and the fifteen people whose business it is to make her quite comfortable. She has no regrets and no longings, because she has always lived perfectly correctly, and does not want anything. She is totally without friends or enemies, and she is never surprised nor enthusiastic nor vexed. About six times a year, on the day preceding one of her dinners, Miss Lyall does not read aloud after tea, but puts the names of her guests on pieces of cardboard, and makes a map of the table, while the evening she leaves London for Hastings or Scotland she stops playing patience at ten, in order to get a good long night before her journey. She does the same on her arrival in town again so as to get a good long night after her journey. She takes no interest in politics, music, drama, or pictures, but goes to the private view of the Academy as May comes round, because The Thing recommends it. And when she comes to die, the life-long consciousness of The Thing will enable her to meet the King of Terrors with fortitude and composure. He will not frighten her at all.
And what on earth will the Recording Angel find to write in his book about her? He cannot put down all those drives round the Park, and all those games of patience, and really there is nothing else to say....
WINIFRED AMES WAS THE YOUNGEST of a family of six girls, none of whom an industrious mother had managed to foist on to incautious husbands. They were all plain and square and strong (like carpets of extra width), and when seated at the family table in Warwick Square with their large firm mother at one end and a mild diminutive father at the other, resembled a Non-Commissioned Officers’ mess. But Winifred was an anomaly, a freak in this array of stalwart maidenhood: there was something pretty about her, and, no less marked a difference between her and her sisters, something distinctly silly about her. Florence and Mary and Diana and Jane and Queenie were all silent and swarthy and sensible, Winifred alone in this barrack of a house represented the lighter side of life. A secret sympathy perhaps existed between her and her father, but they had little opportunity to conspire, for he was packed off to the City immediately after breakfast, and on his return given his dinner, and subsequently a pack of cards to play patience with.
She had a certain faculty of imagination, andher feathery little brains were constantly and secretly occupied in weaving exotic and sentimental romances round herself. If in her walks she received the casual homage of a stare from a passer-by in the street, she flamed with unsubstantial surmises. Positively there was nothing too silly for her; if the passer-by was shabby and disordered she saw in him an eccentric millionaire or a mysterious baronet, casting glances of respectful adoration at her; if he was well-dressed and pleasant to the eye she saw—well, she saw another one. There would be a wild and fevered courtship, at the end of which, in a mist of rice and wedding-bells, she would enter the magnificent Rolls-Royce and drive away, a lady of title, between the lines of the guard of honour furnished by her unfortunate sisters.
She kept these lurid imaginings strictly to herself, aware that neither Florence nor Mary nor Diana nor Jane nor Queenie would extend a sympathetic hearing to them. As far as that went she was sensible enough, for her imagination, lurid as it was, was right in anticipating a very flat and stern reception for them if she confided them to her sisters. But since she never ran the risk of having them dispersed by homely laughter, her day-dreams became more and more real toher, and at the age of twenty-two she was, in a word, silly enough for anything.
Then the amazing thing happened. A real baronet, a concrete, middle-aged, wealthy, delicate baronet who was accustomed to dine at the Non-Commissioned Officers’ mess once or twice in the season, proposed to her, and it appeared that all her imaginings had not been so silly after all. She accepted him without the smallest hesitation, feeling that ‘faith had vanished into sight.’ Besides, her mother was quite firm on the subject.
Sir Gilbert Falcon (such was his prodigious name) was a hypochondriac of perfectly amiable disposition, and his Winny-pinny, as he fatuously called her, was at first extremely contented. He treated her like a toy, when he was well enough to pay any attention to her; and in the manner of a little girl with her doll, he loved dressing her up in silks and jewels, with an admiration that was half child-like, half senile, and completely unmanly. It pleased his vanity that he, a little, withered, greenish man, should have secured so young and pretty a wife, and finding that green suited her, gave her his best jade necklace, the beads of which were perfectly matched, and represented years of patient collecting. Hegave her also for her lifelong adornment the famous Falcon pearls, which pleased her much more. She wore the jade by day, and the pearls in the evening, and he would totter after her, when he felt well enough, into the Rolls-Royce (for the Rolls-Royce had come true also) and take her to dine at the Savoy. Afterwards, when he had drunk his tonic, which he had brought with him in a little bottle, he often felt sufficiently robust to go on to a revue, where he took a box. There he would sit, with a shawl wrapped around his knees, and hold her hand, and tell her that none of the little ladies on the stage were half so enchanting as his Winny-pinny.
Of course he could not indulge in such debauches every night, and the evenings were many when they dined at home and he went to bed at half-past nine. Then when he was warmly tucked up with a hot-water bottle, and an eider-down quilt, he would like her to sit with him, and read to him till he got drowsy. Then he would say, ‘I’m getting near Snooze-land, Winny: shall we just talk a little, until you see me dropping off? And then, my dear, if you want to go out to some ball or party, by all means go, and dance away. Such a strong little Winny-pinny to dance all night, and be a little sunbeam all day—’ Andhis wrinkled eyelids would close, and his mouth fall open, and he would begin to snore. On which his Winny-pinny gently got up, and after shading the light from the bed, left the room.
At first she was vastly contented. Being a quite unreal little creature herself, it seemed delicious that her husband should call her his fairy and his Winny-pinny and his sunbeam, and only require of her little caresses and butterfly-kisses and squeezes. All the secret sentimental imaginings of her girlhood seemed to be translated into actual life; the world was very much on the lines of the day-dreams she had never ventured to tell her sisters. But by degrees fresh horizons opened, and her imagination, reinforced by continuous reading of all the sentimental trash that she could find in circulating libraries, began to frame all sorts of new adventures for herself. Just as, in her girlhood, she had had visions of baronets and millionaires casting glances of hopeless adoration at her in the streets, so now, when she had got her baronet all right, she still clung to the idea of others looking at her with eyes of silent longing. She decided (in a strictly imaginative sense) to have a lover who pined for her.
Now with her pretty meaningless face, pinkand white, with her large china-blue eyes, and yellow hair, it was but natural that there were many men who looked with interest and admiration at her, and were very well content to sit and talk to her in secluded corners at the balls to which she so often went alone. After a few days’ indecision she settled that the hopeless and pining swain (for she was determined to be a faithful wife, that being part of the romance) should be Joe Bailey, a pale and willowy young soldier, who spent most of the day at the manicurist and most of the night in London ball-rooms. From the first time she had seen him, so she now told herself, having adopted him as her lover, she had known that there was some secret sympathy between them; a chord (this came out of the circulating library) vibrated between their two souls. His pallor was instantly accounted for, so too was the tenderness with which he held her hand when they danced together: in spite of his noble reticence his soul had betrayed its secret to her.
After a week or two of noble reticence on his part, she came to the conclusion that she must also pine for him, else there would be no nobility in her fixed determination to be faithful to her husband. She flattered herself that she was getting on nicely with this, when the most dreadful thing happened, for Joe Bailey became engaged to somebody quite different, a real live girl with a great appetite, whose vocabulary was chiefly confined to the word ‘top-hole.’ Winifred herself was ‘top-hole,’ so was Joe Bailey, so were dogs, golfin’ and dancin’. Anything that was not ‘top-hole’ was ‘beastly.’
This was very disconcerting, and seeking safety in numbers Winifred decided to have quantities of lovers, for it was not likely that they should all go and marry somebody else. To ensure greater security she included in her list several married men, who had met her too late. Thus amply provided, she plunged into a new set of adventures.
The situation thus created was truly thrilling, and the thrill was augmented by amorous little sallies on her husband’s part. His nerve tonic suited him, and about this time he used often to go out to dinner with her, and even come on for an hour to a ball, where he sat in a corner, feeding his vitality with the sight of all the youth and energy that whirled in front of him. He liked seeing his Winny-pinny enjoy herself, and gave little squeals of delight when he saw her dancing (her dancing was really admirable) with a seriesof vigorous young men. Then as they drove away together (for when he went to a ball with her, she had to come away with him) he would squeeze her hand and say:
‘Who was that last young man my Winny-pinny danced with? And who was it in the dance before who looked at her so fondly? And who was it she sat out with all that time? But her old man was watching her: oh, he had his eye on her!’
Here then was the thrill of thrills in the new situation. Gilbert had noticed how many men were in love with her. And before long she added to herself the almost inevitable corollary, ‘Gilbert is so terribly jealous.’
But in spite of Gilbert’s terrible jealousy, and the suffocating crowds of lovers, nothing particular happened. The lovers all remained nobly reticent, and a fresh desire entered her circulating-library soul. She must get talked about: people other than Gilbert must notice the fatal spell that she exercised broadcast over the adoring males of London: she must get compromised, somehow or other she must get compromised.
According to the circulating library there was nothing easier. A note with a few passionate words addressed to her had only to be picked upby somebody else’s wife, or somebody else’s husband had only to be found on his knees at midnight in her boudoir (a word she affected) and the thing was done. But, as always, it was thepremier pas qui coûte, and these enchanting situations, she supposed, had to be led up to. A total stranger would not go on his knees at midnight in her boudoir, or leave passionate notes about; she had to rouse in another the emotion on which were built those heavenly summits, and begin, so to speak, in the valleys.
At this point a wonderful piece of luck came her way. The faithless Joe Bailey had his engagement broken off. It was generally supposed that the top-hole girl found him beastly, but Winifred knew better. She felt convinced that he had broken it off on her account, finding that passionate celibacy was the only possible condition for one who had met her too late. Here was an avenue down which compromise might enter, and when in answer to a broad hint of hers, he asked her to play golf with him at Richmond, she eagerly consented.
The plan was that he should lunch with Sir Gilbert and herself, and Sir Gilbert held out hopes that if it was not too hot, he would drive down with them, sit on the verandah, or perhapswalk a hole or two with them, and drive back again at the conclusion of their game. But these hopes were shattered or—should it be said—more exciting hopes were gloriously mended, for an inspection of the thermometer convinced him that it would be more prudent to stay indoors till the heat of the day waned. So she and Joe Bailey drove off together in the Rolls-Royce.
She looked anxiously round as they left the door in Grosvenor Square.
‘I wonder if it was wise of us to come in this car,’ she said, timidly.
Bailey looked critically round.
‘Why not,’ he said rather stupidly. ‘Quite a good car, isn’t it?’
Clearly he was not awake to the danger.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘but people are so ill-natured. They might think it odd for you and me to be driving about in Gilbert’s car.’
He was still odiously obtuse.
‘Well, they couldn’t expect us to walk all the way to Richmond, could they?’ he said.
To her great delight, Winifred saw at this moment a cousin of her husband’s, and bowed and waved her hand and kissed her fingers. She sat very much back as she did this so that Florrie Falcon, who had a proverbially unkind tongue,could clearly see the young man who sat by her side. That made her feel a little better, for it was even more important that other people should see her in the act of doing compromising things, than that he with whom she compromised herself should be aware of the fact. During their game again they came across several people whom Bailey or she knew, who, it was to be hoped, would mention the fact that they had been seen together.
It was a distinct disappointment to poor Winifred that this daring escapade seemed to have attracted so little notice, but she did not despair. A further glorious opportunity turned up indeed only a day or two later, for her husband was threatened with what he called a bronchial catarrh (more usually known as a cough) and departed post-haste to spend a couple of days at Brighton. Winifred, so it happened, was rather full of engagements, and he readily fell in with her wish to stop in town, and not to accompany him. So, the moment she had ceased kissing her fingertips to him as he drove away in the Rolls-Royce with all the windows hermetically closed, she ran back into the house, and planned a daring scheme. She telephoned to Lady Buckhampton’s, where she was dining and dancing that night, to say herhusband had this tiresome bronchial catarrh, and that she was going down to Brighton with him, and, while the words were scarcely spoken, telephoned to Joe Bailey asking him to dine with them. He accepted, suggesting that they should go to the first-night at the Criterion after dinner, and then go on to the Buckhamptons’ dance.
A perfect orgie of compromising situations swam before her, more thrilling even than the famous kneeling scene in her boudoir at midnight. She would go to the Criterion with her unsuspecting lover, where certainly there would be many people who would go on to the Buckhampton dance afterwards. They would all have seen her and Joe Bailey together, and even if they did not, he in the babble of ball-room conversation would doubtless popularise the fact of their having been there together. He might even tell Lady Buckhampton, whose invitation, on the plea of absence at Brighton with her husband, she had excused herself from, about this daring adventure.
The mere material performance of this evening came up to the brilliance of its promise. All sorts of people saw her and her companion, and the play happening by divine fitness to be concerned with a hero who backed out of his engagementat the last moment because he loved somebody else, Winifred could scarcely be expected not to turn blue eyes that swam with sympathy on her poor Joe. But again this hopeless young man did not understand, and whispered to know if she wanted sixpenny-worth of opera-glasses. He saw her home—this she had not contemplated—and sat with her in the barren boudoir, smoking a cigarette. Surely now he would slide on to his knees? But he did not, and went to his ball. There he actually told Lady Buckhampton that he had dined and been to the play with Lady Falcon, and she only laughed and said, ‘Dear little Winny! She told me some nonsense about going to Brighton with her husband. How-de-do?How-de-do? So nice of you to have come.’
Then it is true Winny almost despaired of this particular lover. She made one more frantic effort when she met him next day at lunch, and said, ‘You must talk to your neighbour more. People will notice,’ but this only had the effect of making him talk to his neighbour, which was not what she meant.
She decided to give another lover a chance, and selected Herbert Ashton, a somewhat older man, who no doubt would understand her better.Several encouraging circumstances happened here, for her husband more than once remarked on the frequency with which he came to the house, and she thought one day that Lady Buckhampton cut her in the Park. This joy, it is true, was of short duration, for Lady Buckhampton asked her to spend the week-end with them next day, and she was forced to conclude that the cut had not been an intentional one. But it stimulated her to imagine a very touching scene in which Herbert, when they were alone together in the boudoir, was to say, ‘This is killing me,’ and fold her in his arms. For one moment she would yield to his fervent embrace, the next she would pluck herself from him and say, ‘Herbert, I am a married woman: we met too late!’ On which he would answer, ‘Forgive me, my dearest: I behaved like a cad.’
And then the most dreadful thing of all happened, for part, at any rate, of her imaginings came true. She was with Herbert shortly afterwards in her boudoir, and in ordinary decent response to a quantity of little sighs and glances and glances away and affinity-gabble on her part, he had given her a good sound proper kiss. But it was real; it was as different as possible from all the tawdry tinsel sentimentalities which shehad for years indulged in, and it simply terrified her. She gave one little squeal, and instead of yielding for a moment to his fervent embrace, and saying, ‘Herbert, I am a married woman, etc.,’ cried, ‘Oh, Mr. Ashton!’ which was very bald.
He looked at her completely puzzled. He felt certain she meant him to kiss her, and had done so.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind.’
A dreadful silence overcharged with pathos followed. Then recovering herself a little, she remembered her part.
‘You must go now,’ she said faintly, with a timid glance that was meant to convey the struggle she was going through. But unfortunately he only said ‘Right oh,’ and went.
Since that day she has always retreated in time to prevent anything real occurring. But she cannot succeed in getting talked about in connection with anybody. The instinct of London generally, often at fault, is here perfectly correct. She can’t be compromised—no one will believe anything against a woman so mild. And all the time, in the clutch of her sentimental temperament, she sees herself the heroine of great romances. Lately she has been reading Dante (in a translation) and feels that England lacks someone like the mighty Florentine poet, for his Beatrice is waiting for him....
It is all rather sad for poor Winny-pinny. It is as if she desired the rainbow that hangs athwart the thundercloud. But ever, as faint yet pursuing she attempts to approach, it recedes with equal speed. Indeed, it is receding faster than she pursues now, for her hair is getting to be of dimmer gold, and the skin at the outer corners of those poor eyes, ever looking out for unreal lovers, is beginning faintly to suggest the aspect of a muddy lane, when a flock of sheep have walked over it, leaving it trodden and dinted.
A FOUNT OF PERENNIAL YOUTHFULNESS has been and will be the blessing and curse of certain people’s existence. Up to the age of about thirty-five for a woman and round about forty for a man, it is an admirable thing to feel that the morning of life is still lingering in rosy cloudlets about you, but when these austere ages have been arrived at, it is wiser for those who still behave like imperishable children to recollect, impossible though they will find the realisation of it without exercising patience and determination, that, though their immortal souls are doubtless imperishable, they are no longer boys and girls. Otherwise the dreadful fate of becoming grizzly kittens will soon lay ambushes for them, and to be a grizzly kitten does not produce at all the same impression as being an imperishable child. Like Erin in the song and King David in the psalm, they should remember and consider the days of old, and attempt quietly and constantly to do a little subtraction sum, whereby they will ascertain how far the days of old have receded from them. Their spring-tide has ebbed a long way since then: they are swimming in it no longer, they are not even paddling, but they are standingjust a little gaunt and skinny high up on the beach, with wisps of dry sea-weed whistling round their emaciated ankles. Almost invariably those threatened with grizzly kittenhood are spare and thin, for this fact encourages the pathetic delusion that they have youthful figures, and in a dim light, to eyes that are losing their early pitilessness of vision they doubtless seem slim and youthful to themselves, though they rarely present this appearance to each other. But it is very uncommon to find a stout grizzly kitten: amplitude makes it impossible to skip about, and cannot be so readily mistaken by its hopeful possessors for youthful slimness.
Imperishable children, who are threatened with grizzly kittenhood, are, like other children and kittens, male and female. At this stage great indulgence must be extended to them whichever their sex may be, for their error is based upon vitality, which, however misapplied, is in itself the most attractive quality in the world. That they have no sense of time is in comparison a smaller consideration. For they are always cheerful, always optimistic, and if, at the age of forty, they have a slight tendency to say that events of twenty years ago are shrouded in the mists of childhood and the nursery, this is but an amiable failing,and one that is far easier to overlook than many of the more angular virtues. Of the two the female grizzly kitten (in the early stages of the complaint) is entitled to greater kindliness than her grizzly brother, for the obvious reason that in the fair of Mayfair the merry-go-round and the joy-wheel slow down for women sooner than they do for men. Thus the temptation to a woman of behaving as if it was not slowing down, is greater than to a man. It will go on longer for him; he has less excuse—since he has had a longer joy-ride—for pretending that it is still quite at its height of revolving giddiness. She—if she is gifted with the amazing vitality which animates grizzly kittens—can hardly help still screaming and clapping her hands and changing hats, when first the hurdy-gurdy and the whirling begin to slacken, in order to persuade herself that they are doing nothing of the sort. If she is wise, she will of course slip off the joy-wheel and, like Mr. Wordsworth, ‘only find strength in what remains behind.’ But if she did that, the danger of her grizzly kittenhood would be over. Pity her then, when first the slowing-down process begins, but give less pity to the man who will not accept the comparatively kinder burden of his middle-age. Besides, when the earlystages of grizzly kittenhood are past, the woman who still clings to her skippings and her rheumatic antics after blind-tassels has so much the harder gymnastics to perform.
Two sad concrete examples of grizzly-kittenhood, both in advanced stages, await our commiseration. Mrs. Begum (née Adeline Armstrong) is the first. From her childhood the world conspired to make a grizzly kitten of her, and in direct contravention of the expressed wishes of her godfather and godmother who said she was to be Adeline, insisted on calling her Baby. Baby Armstrong she accordingly remained until the age of twenty-five, when she became Baby Begum, and she never got further from that odious appellation, at her present age of fifty-two, than being known as Babs, while even now her mother, herself the grizzliest of all existing kittens, calls her Baby still.
Babs appeared in Mayfair at the age of seventeen, and instantly took the town by storm, in virtue of her authentic and audacious vitality. She had the face of a Sir Joshua Reynolds angel, the figure of a Botticelli one, the tongue of agamin, and the spirits of an everlasting carnival. Her laugh, the very sound of that delicious enjoyment, set the drawing-room in a roar, and herconversation the smoking-room, where she was quite at home—there was never anyone so complete as she, never such an apple of attractiveness, of which all could have a slice. She would ride in the Row of a morning, call the policeman, who wanted to take her name on the score of excessive velocity, ‘Arthur dear,’ and remind him how she had danced in the cause of police old-age pensions at Clerkenwell (which was perfectly true), thus melting his austere heart. Then, as like as not, she would get off her horse at the far end of the ladies’ mile, and put on it an exhausted governess, with orders to the groom to see her safe home to Bayswater. Then she would sit on the rail, ask a passer-by for a cigarette, and hold a little court of adorers, male and female alike, until her horse came back again. She would, in rare intervals of fatigue, go to bed about four o’clock in the morning, when her mother was giving a ball in Prince’s Gate, and stand on the balcony outside her bedroom in her nightgown, and talk to the remaining guests as they left the house, shrieking good wishes, and blowing kisses. Or if the fit so took her, instead of going to bed she would change her ball-dress for a riding-habit, go down to the mews with Charlie or Tommy or Harry, or indeed with Bertha orFlorrie or Madge (fitting these latter up with other habits) and start for a ride in the break of the summer morning, returning hungry and dewy to breakfast. Wherever she went the world laughed with her; she enhaloed all she shone upon. Chiefly did she shine upon Charlie Gordon, who, in the measure of a man, was a like comet to herself. He was some five years older than she, and they expected to marry each other when the fun became less fast and furious. In the interval, among other things, they had a swimming-race across the Serpentine one early August morning, and she won by two lengths. An angry Humane Society boat jabbed at them with hooks in order to rescue them. These they evaded.
Those whom Nature threatens with grizzly kittenhood live too much on the surface to be able to spare much energy for such engrossing habits as falling in love, and when, at the age of twenty-five she suddenly determined to marry the small and silent Mr. Begum, nobody was surprised and many applauded. She could not go on swimming the Serpentine with Charlie Gordon, and it seemed equally unimaginable that she should marry a man with only £2000 a year and no prospects of any sort or kind. She did not imperatively want him, any more than he imperatively wanted her, and since that one conclusive reason for matrimony was absent, it did not particularly matter whom she married, so long as he was immensely wealthy, and of an indulgent temper. By nationality, Mr. Begum owed about equal debts to Palestine, Poland, and the Barbados, and since at this epoch, Palestine at any rate was in the ascendant over the roofs of Mayfair it was thought highly suitable that Baby Armstrong should become Baby Begum. She had always called Charlie Gordon, ‘dear,’ or ‘darling,’ or ‘fool,’ and she explained it all to him in the most illuminating manner.
‘Darling, you quite understand, don’t you?’ she said, as she rode beside him one morning in the Park. ‘Jehoshaphat’s a perfect dear, and he suits me. Life isn’t all beer and skittles, otherwise I would buy some beer, and you would save up to get a second-hand skittle alley, and there we should be! My dear, do look at that thing on the chestnut coming down this way. Is it a goat or isn’t it? I think it’s a goat. Oh don’t be a fool, dear, you needn’t be a fool. Of course everybody thought we were going to marry each other, but what can matter less than what everybody thinks? And besides, I know quite well that you haven’t the slightest intention of gettingbroken-hearted about me, and the only thing you mind about it is that I have shown I have not got a broken heart about you. What really is of importance is what I am to call Jehoshaphat. I can’t call him Jehu, because he doesn’t do anythink furiously, and I can’t call him “Fat,” because he’s thin, and there’s nothing left!’
‘I should call him “darling,” then,’ said Charlie, who was still unconvinced by this flagrant philosophy, ‘same as you call me.’
She looked at him almost regretfully.
‘Oh, do be sensible,’ she said. ‘I know I’m right: I feel I’m right. Get another girl. There are lots of them, you know.’
Charlie had the most admirable temper.
‘I’ll take your advice,’ he said. ‘And, anyhow, I wish you the best of luck. I hope you’ll be rippingly happy. Come on, let’s have a gallop.’
Since then, years, as impatient novelists so often inform us, passed. Babs’s philosophy of life was excellent as far as it went, and the only objection to it was that it did not go far enough. In spite of his vitality, Charlie did not, as a sensible young man should, see about getting another girl; for perhaps he was wounded a little deeper than either he or Babs knew. The tragedy about it all is that they both had the constitution of grizzly
[Image unavailalbe.]The Grizzly Kittens.
The Grizzly Kittens.
The Grizzly Kittens.
kittens. He did not marry any one else, nor did he live into his age as that slowly increased upon him, and Mr. Begum got asthma. This made him very tiresome and wheezy, and the perpetual contact with senility probably prevented Babs from growing into her proper mould of increasing years. Her sense of youth was constantly fed by her husband’s venerable habits; with him she always felt a girl. And the ruthless decades proceeded in their Juggernaut march, without her ever seeing the toppling car that now overhangs her, stiff with the wooden images of age. Wooden, at any rate, they will seem to her when she fully perceives them, and robbed of the graciousness and wisdom that might have clothed and softened them if only she had admitted their advent.
As it is, two pathetic figures confront us. Charlie Gordon, that slim entrancing youth, is just as slim (in fact slimmer in the wrong places) as he ever was. But he is a shade less entrancing, with his mincing entry into the assembling party than he was twenty-five years ago. There was no need for him to mince then, for his eager footsteps carried him, as with Hermes-heels, on the wings of youth. Now he takes little quick steps, and thinks it is the same thing. He is justas light and spry as ever (except when he is troubled with lumbago) but he cannot see that it is not the same thing. He has not noticed that his lean youthful jaw has a queer little fold in the side of it, and if he notices it, he thinks it is a dimple. He brushes his hair very carefully now, not knowing that to the disinterested observer the top of his head looks rather like music-paper, with white gaps in between the lines, and that it is quite obvious that he grows those thinning locks very long on one side of his head (just above the ear) and trains them in the manner of an espaliered pear over the denuded bone where once a plume used jauntily to erect itself. He is careful about them now, but once, not so very long ago, he forgot how delicately trained were those tresses, and went down to bathe with the other boys of the house. They naturally came detached from their proper place, and streamed after him as he swam, like the locks of a Rhine-maiden. It was rather terrible. But such as they are, they are still glossy raven black: there is not the smallest hint of grey anywhere about them.
Again, once in days of old he had quick staccato little movements of his head, like some young wild animal, which suited the swiftness of his mercurial gambollings very well; to this daythat particular habit has persisted, but the effect of it somehow is dismally changed; it is galvanic and vaguely suggests St. Vitus’s abominable dance. He still jumps about with joy when he is pleased, but those skippings resemble rather the antics of a marionette than coltish friskings. He feels young, at least he has that quenchless appetite for pleasure that is characteristic of the young, but he isn’t young, and his tragedy, the rôle of the grizzly kitten, stares him in the face. Perhaps he will never perceive it himself, and go on as usual, slightly less agile owing to the increasing stiffness of his venerable joints, until the days of his sojourning here are ended. Or perhaps he will see it, and after a rather depressing week or two turn into a perfectly charming old man with a bald head and spectacles and a jolly laugh.
Mrs. Begum’s fate hangs in the balance also. She has begun to think it rather daring of her to go larking about with a boy who is easily young enough to be her son, whereas in the days when such manœuvres were rather daring she never gave two thoughts to them. She still likes (or pretends to like) sitting up to the end of a ball, not in the least realizing how appalling a spectacle she presents in the light of a June dawn. Shecan easily be persuaded to tuck up her skirts and dance the tango or the fox-trot or whatever it is that engages the attention of the next generation, and if she wants to sit down, she is as likely as not to flop cross-legged on the floor, or to perch herself on a friend’s knee, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne cup in the other, and tell slightly risky stories, such as amused the partners of her youth. But for all her wavings of her wand, the spell does not work nowadays, and when poor Babs begins to be naughty, it is kinder of her friends to go away. Kitten-like she jumps at the blind-tassel still, but it is weary, heavy work, and she creaks, she creaks....
But the most degrading exhibition of all is when Babs and Charlie get together. Then in order to show, each to each, that time writes no wrinkles on their azure brows, they give a miserable display of mature skittishness. They see which of them can scream loudest, laugh most, eat most, drink most, romp most, and, in a word, be grizzliest. Their manner of speech has not changed in the smallest degree in the lapse of thirty years, and to the young people about it sounds like some strange and outlandish tongue such as was current in the reign of the secondGeorge. They are always betraying themselves, too, by whistling ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ or some ditty belonging to the dark ages, and to correct themselves pretend that their mother taught it them when she came to kiss them good-night in their cribs. They do not deceive anybody else by their jumpings, they do not deceive each other, and perhaps they do not deceive themselves. But it is as if a curse was on them: they have got to be dewy and Maylike: if Charlie wants a book from the far end of the room he runs to get it; when they go into dinner together they probably slide along the parquet floor. He is a little deaf, and pretending to hear all that is said, makes the most idiotic replies; and she is a little blind, and cannot possibly read the papers without spectacles, which she altogether refuses to wear. If only they had married each other thirty years ago they would probably have mellowed a little, or at least could have told each other how ridiculous they were being. As it is, they both have to screw themselves up to the key of the time when they swam the Serpentine together. Poor dear old frauds, why do they try to wrench themselves up to concert pitch still? Such a concert pitch! such strainings and bat-like squeaks! It would be so much better to get a little flatand fluffy, on the grounds of greater comfort to themselves, not to mention motives of humanity to others. For, indeed, they are rather a ghastly sight, dabbing and squawking at each other on the sofa, in memory of days long ago. The young folk only wonder who those ‘funny old buffers’ are, and they wonder even more when the funny old buffers insist on joining in a game of fives on the billiard-table, and the room resounds with bony noises as their hands hit the flying ball. But they scream in earnest then, because it does really hurt them very much. And then Mr. Begum gets wheeled in in his invalid chair with his rugs and his foot-warmers, and insists on talking to Charlie Gordon when the game is over (and his hands feel as if they had been bastinadoed), as if he was really an elderly man, and can remember the Franco-German war, which of course he can. But Charlie, though he stoutly denies the imputation, feels very uncomfortable, and changes the subject at the earliest opportunity. By this time Babs will have organized a game of rounders or something violent in the garden, in order to show that she is young too. She is getting very nut-crackery, and looks tired and haggard, as indeed she is. But she shouts to her husband, who is muchdeafer than Charlie, ‘Daddy, darling, we’re going to play rounders! Would you like to come out, or do you think it will be rather cold for you? Perhaps you’d be wiser not to. You won’t play, I suppose, Charlie?’
And Charlie, nursing his bruised hands, says, ‘Rounders? Bless me, yes. I’m not quite past rounders yet. Nothing like a good run-about game to keep you fit.’
It keeps him so fit that he is compelled to have a good stiff brandy and soda afterwards, to tone him up for the exertion of having dinner.
Wearily, aching in every limb, they creep into their respective beds. There seems to be a pillow-fight going on somewhere at the end of the passage, with really young voices shrieking, and the swift pad of light feet. Babs thinks of joining it, but her fingers fall from the pillow she had caught up, and she gets into bed instead, thinking she will be up to anything after a good night. And she would be up to anything that could decently be required of her, if only she would not present her grim and dauntless figure at such excursions. Already Charlie is dropping into a sleep of utter prostration: he wants to be in good trim to-morrow. There he lies with his thin Rhine-maiden hair reposing on his pillow. But hewakes easily, though slightly deaf, and at the first rattle of his door-handle when his valet calls him next morning he will instinctively gather it up over his poor bald pate.
And they might both be so comfortable and jolly and suitable. There is a wounding pathos about them both.
THE MOST CASUAL OBSERVER OF THE beauties and uglinesses of Nature will have observed that in the anatomy of that very common object, a Tree, there are two widely different classes of branches. The one class grows more or less straight out from the trunk and after a horizontal career droops somewhat at the extremities, the other grows upwards in a persevering and uniform ascent. Such branches when springing high up on the trunk of the tree form the very top of the tree.
But though these facts are patent in vegetable life, and though it is clear that anybody not idiotic and sufficiently active can climb more or less successfully up a tree going higher and higher, and selecting for his ascent the branches that aspire, and not making a precarious way along the other class of branch which at the best is horizontal, and at the worst droops downwards, it seems there must be greater difficulties in the ascension of what is known among climbers as the Tree of Society. For while you may see some of them climbing steadily higher, and ever mounting till their electro-plated forms are lost amid the goldof the topmost foliage, and their joyful monkey-cries mingle and almost are entuned with the song of the native birds who naturally make their nest there, you will see other climbers—the majority in fact—eagerly scrambling for ever along perfectly horizontal boughs that never bring them any higher up at all, and eventually, depressed by their weight, but bend earthwards again. Unlike the happier apes who have aflairfor altitude and bird-song, these less fortunate sisters have only aflairfor clinging and proceeding.
There are of course specimens of these Trees of Society in every town in England, and specimens of the monkeys who hop about them. But those are but small trees and the climbers small apes, and the climbing of these shrubs appears to present but moderate difficulties. The great specimen, the one glorious and perfect human vegetable which grows in England, flourishes only in the centre of London; its roots draw their nutriment from the soil of Middlesex (not of Surrey), and its top, resonant with birds, soars high into the ample ether of Mayfair. It is a regular monkey-puzzle, and swarms with industrious climbers going in every direction, most of them, unfortunately, proceeding with infinite toil along horizontal branches, while others slowly orswiftly make their way upwards. Occasionally, with shrill screams and impotent clutchings at the trunk, one falls, and the higher the fall, the more completely dead will he (or she, particularly she) be when he reaches the ground. She may lie, faintly twitching for a minute or two, while grimacing faces of friends peer down at her, but even before her twitchings have ceased they have turned to their businesses again, for no climber ever has a moment’s rest, and a few ghouls crawl out from the bushes and bear away the corpse for interment wrapped up in a winding sheet of the less respectable journals of the day.... Let us study the unnatural history of these curious brightly-coloured creatures a little more in detail.
Dismissing the metaphor of the trees, we may say that at one time or another these climbers have come to London, like Dick Whittington. Possibly they may always have lived in London, taking London as a mere geographical expression, but London, considered as a spiritual (or unspiritual) entity, has at one time or other in their lives dawned upon them as a shining and desirable thing, and they have said to themselves, gazing upwards, ‘I want; I want.’ They have probably had more than the proverbial halfcrown in their pockets, for climbing is an expensive job, with all the provisions and guides and ropes and axes necessary for its accomplishment, and half-a-crown would not go very far. Unlike Dick Whittington, however, they have not brought their cat along with them, but they get their cat, so to speak, when they begin to climb. In other words, without metaphor, they hook on to somebody, a pianist, or a duchess, or a buffoon, or an artist, or a cabinet-minister, or something striking of some kind, and firmly clutch it. Eminence of any sort, whether of birth or of achievement, is naturally a useful aid in ascensions, while on the other hand the climber’s half-crowns, or her flattery, or her dinners, or her country-house, perhaps even the climber herself, holds attractions for the particular piece of eminence she has put the hook into. It is her mascot, her latch-key, her passport—what you will—and she is wise to cling on to it for dear life. The mascot may not like it at first, he may wriggle and struggle, but on no account should she let go. Probably he gets accustomed to it quite soon, and does not mind being her electric light which she turns on when she chooses, and, incidentally, pays for quite honestly. The two begin, in a way, to run each other, in most cases without scandal orany cause for scandal, and, mutually sustained, soar upwards together. By means of her mascot she attracts his friends to her house, so that he knows that whenever he goes there he will find congenial spirits and an excellent dinner, while she, if she is clever (and no climbers, whether horizontals or perpendiculars, are without wits), finds herself gently wafted upwards.
She will probably have begun her climb up the first few feet of the branchless trunk with the aid of ladders, friends and acquaintances (chiefly acquaintances) who have introduced her to one or two desirable folk, her mascot among them, and have enabled her to lay her slim prehensile hand on the lowest branches. At this point, having now a firm hold, so it seems to her, she will often kick her ladders down, perhaps not really intending to kick them, but in her spring upwards doing so almost accidentally. But if she does, she commits a great stupidity, and it is almost safe to bet that she will prove a horizontal. For it may easily prove that she will need those same ladders again a little higher up the trunk where there is a hiatus in branches, and returning for them will find them no longer there. They will not be lying prone on the ground as she probably thought (if she gave anotherthought to them at all), but they will be somewhere the other side of the tree, out of reach. She has to coax them back, and it is possible they will not come for her coaxing. And while she is pondering she may loose hold of her mascot, who will scramble away. In that case, she had better jump down at once, and begin (slightly soiled) all over again.
To take a concrete instance, after this general introduction (as if, after reading a book about some curious and interesting animal we went to the Zoological Gardens to observe its appearance and habits), Mrs. Howard Britten furnishes a good example of the horizontal variety. Where the ‘Howard’ came from nobody knew or cared; she just took it, and since no one else wanted it, nothing was said. She had married a genial solicitor, who from contact with the dusky secrets of the great, had acquired a liking for their sunlight, and did not in the least object to being put in his wife’s knapsack. He made a very large income in his profession, and found that, though household expenses began to mount even quicker than his wife, the house in Brompton Square became considerably more amusing when the climbing began. He took no active part in it, but merely popped his head out of the knapsack