HIS SILHOUETTE
“HE walked down Upper Bond Street, after leaving his chambers, half-way up on the left-hand side. The ground floor is occupied by the only London purveyor of American chewing-gum, who does a tremendous business in the imported article, and the shop is crowded all day by ladies, young and old, whose jaws, even in moments of repose from conversation, are in perpetual motion. Englishwomen do not yet chew gum. Let us hope that our wives, sweethearts, sisters, and cousins will be slow to acquire what, in my opinion, is an unpleasant habit, but too suggestive of arboreal tendencies inherited from anthropoid ancestors.�
The man who was telling the story stretched out his hand across the coffee-cups to select a toothpick. The man who opposed him at the table promptly annexed the glass-and-silver receptacle containing the article required.
“The original ape,� he said, “probably employed a twig. I cannot encourage you in a practice you so strongly denounce. Waiter, take these things away! Bonson, my good fellow, let us hear your story—if it is worth hearing. If not, keep it to yourself. The man began by walking down Bond Street. There is nothing original in that. I myself do it every day without being the hero of a story.�
“This man was the hero of a tragedy,� said the man who was telling the story. “Other people might smile at it for a farce—it was a tragedy to him.�
“Where did the horror of it come in?� asked the other man.
“Under Shelmadine’s waistcoat,� said the man who had been addressed as Bonson. “Shelmadine was losing his figure, which had been his joy and pride and the delight of the female eye ever since he left Oxford, without his degree, and, thanks to the influence of his uncle, Colonel Sir Barberry Bigglesmith, K.C.B., Assistant Under-Secretary to the Ordnance Office Council, took up a Second Division Higher-grade Clerkship at £280 per annum, which sufficiently supplemented his younger son’s allowance of £500 to make it feasible to get along with some show of decency—don’t you follow me?�
“If I had followed this beggar down Upper Bond Street,� hinted the other man, knocking an ash off a long, slim High Dutch cigar, “where would he have led me?�
“Into his tailor’s,� said the man who had been addressed as Bonson promptly. “He walked in there regularly every day on his way to the War Office. Clothes were his passion—in fact, he simply couldn’t live without clothes!�
“Could we?� answered the other man simply.
“I have heard that Europeans shipwrecked on the palm-fringed shores of a Pacific Island,� said Bonson, “have managed to do very well without them. Under those circumstances, let me tell you, Shelmadine would still have managed to be well dressed. He would have evolved style out of cocoa-fiber and elegance out of banana-leaves, or he would have died in the attempt. I am trying to convey to you that he had a genius for clothes. He evolved ideas which sartorial artists were only too happy to carry out. He gave bootmakers hintswhich made their reputations. He would run over to Paris every month or so to look at Le Bargy’s hat and cravats. He never told anyone where he got his walking sticks, but they were wonderful. I tell you——�
“Every man likes to be well dressed,� said the man who was listening to the story, “but this beggar seems to have had coats and trousers on the brain.�
“Rather,� said the narrator. “He thought of clothes, dreamed of clothes—lived for clothes alone. Garments were his fad, his folly, his passion, his mania, his dearest object in life. Men consulted him—men who wanted to be particularly well got-up couldn’t do better than put themselves in Shelmadine’s hands. He permitted no servile copying of the modes and styles he exhibited on his person. ‘Forge my name,’ he said to a fellow once, ‘but never copy the knot of my necktie!’ Chap took the advice, and did forge his name—to the tune of £60. Shelmadine would not prosecute. He was planning an overcoat—a kind of Chesterfield, cut skirty—with which he made a sensation at Doncaster this year, and when a certain Distinguished Personage condescended to order one like it, Shelmadine made the three he had got, quite new, and wickedly expensive, into a parcel, poured on petrol, and applied a match. Shut himself up for three days, and appeared on the fourth with a perfectly new silhouette.�
“A perfectly new what?� said the listener, with circular eyes.
“Shelmadine’s creed was that for a man to look thoroughly well dressed he must have a perfect silhouette. Every line about him must be perfect. The sweep of the shoulders, the spring of the hips, the arch over the instep, and so forth, must display the cut of scissors wielded by an artist—not a mere workman. Now, onthis particular morning, not so very long ago, it had been brought home to him, as he looked in his full-length, quadruple-leaved, swing-balance, double lever-action cheval glass, that the reflection it gave back to him was not quite satisfactory. His silhouette did not satisfy him. Then all at once came with a rush the overwhelming discovery that he was——�
“Getting potty,� said the listener. “Those Government clerkships play the devil with a man’s waist. Nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep, walk, or drive to the Office and sit in a chair gumming up envelopes or drawing heads on the blotting paper when you’re there, until you fall asleep. Once you’re asleep, you don’t wake till it’s time to go home. Consequently you develop adipose tissue.� He yawned.
“Do you suppose,� asked the teller of the tale, with large contempt, “that Shelmadine lived the life of one of those human marmots—Shelmadine, a man so sensitively, keenly alive to the beauty of Shape, Form, Line, and Proportion? Do you dream that he lightly risked the inevitable result of indulgence in the pleasures of the table or the delights of drowsiness? If so, you are wrong. He rose at 5 a.m., winter and summer, in town or country, and after a hot bath, followed by a cold douche, pursued a course of physical exercises until seven, when he breakfasted on milkless tea, dry toast, or gluten biscuits�—the other man shuddered—“with, perhaps, a little plain boiled fish, its lack of flavor undisguised by Worcester sauce or any other condiment.�
“Horrible!� said the other man. “I once tried....�
“After breakfast, in all weathers, he walked five miles, within the Radius, returning to dress for the day. Anon he would saunter down Bond Street, look in at the shops, where he was adored, and criticize the new models submittedto him, as only Shelmadine could, show himself at his Club, stroll in the Park, and get to the Ordnance Office about eleven. The floors at Whitehall are solidly built, consequently his habit of jumping backward and forward over the office-table when he felt his muscles dangerously relaxed, met with little, if any, opposition in the Department. Dumb-bells, of course, were always ready to hand. At his Club the invariable luncheon supplied to him was the eye of a grilled cutlet, a glass of claret and water, eight stewed prunes, and, of course, more gluten biscuits. He shunned fat-forming foods more than he would the devil!�
“And made his life a hell!� said the other man, with conviction.
“My dear fellow,� said the relater, “you can’t understand what a man’s life is or is not until you have seen both sides of it. A Second Division Higher-Grade War Office clerkship allows of a good deal of liberty. Picture Shelmadine as theenfant gâtéof Society, followed, stared at, caressed and courted, by the smartest feminine leaders of fashion, as well as by the swellest men, as the acknowledged Oracle in Clothes. There’s a position for a young man single-handed to have achieved. To be the vogue—the rage—thecoq de village—thevillagebeing London—and at twenty-seven.�
“Exhausting,� said the other man, “to keep up, but sufficiently agreeable. Quite sufficiently agreeable! And I realize that at the psychological moment, when the fellow discovered that his figure had begun to run to seed, he sustained a shock—kind of cold moral and mentaldouchea professional beauty gets when her toilet glass shows her the first crow’s-foot. Did your friend have hysterics and ask his valet for sal-volatile? I should expect it of him!�
“Shelmadine did not employ a man,� said the teller of the tale, fixing his eyeglass firmly in its place, “to do anything but brush his clothes. For all other purposes connected with the toilet he preferred a Swiss lady’s-maid. Do not misunderstand, my friend,� he added sternly, as the listener exploded in a guffaw of laughter. “Honi soit... the rest of the quotation is familiar to you. And Mariette Duchâtel had been strongly recommended to him by his aunt, Lady Bigglesmith, as a most desirable person for the post of housekeeper. She was at least fifty—retained the archæological remains of good looks, and owned a moustache a buddin’ Guardsman might be jealous of, by Jingo! But her heart had remained youthful, or we may so conjecture.�
“I begin to tumble to the situation of the swelling subject of your story,� said the other man, pouring out a Benedictine. “When your elderly housekeeper happens to be in love with you, it is bad enough. Things become complicated when the victim of your charms happens to be your maid. Continue!�
“A visit to his tailor’s on the day on which my story begins,� said Bonson, “convinced Shelmadine that—in fact, his outlines were becoming indefinite. ‘This will not do, sir,’ said his tailor, a grave and himself a portly personage, ‘with your reputation for silhouette to keep up—and at your years. We will let out the garment one inch—a thing I decline to do even for Royal Personages, as destructive of the design—and as this is now the Autumn Season I recommend you to obtain leave. Klümpenstein in the Tyrol has a reputation for reducing weight; its waters have done wonders for several of my customers, and the Rittenberg affords several thousand feet of climbing opportunity to tourists who wish to be quickly rid of superfluous girth. But, first of all, Ishould consult Dr. Quox, of Harley Street. Good-morning.’
“Quox of Harley Street went into Shelmadine’s case, elicited the fact that his maternal grandfather had turned the scale at twenty stone, that his mother, Lady Fanny, hadn’t seen her own shoe-buckles for eighteen years, except when the shoes weren’t on—don’t you twig?—and that he possessed what Quox pleased to call ‘a record of family obesity.’ So Shelmadine, who, in spite of rigorous diet and redoubled physical exercises, kept getting more and more uncertain in his outlines, rushed frantically off to Klümpenstein in the Tyrol, with what was, for him, quite a limited wardrobe. He drank the water—infernally nasty, too—and climbed the Rittenberg religiously, without finding his lost silhouette. Only on the Dolomittenweg, a pine-shaded promenade of great promise in the flirtatious line, he did find—a girl. And, despite his anxiety with regard to his silhouette, they had an uncommonly pleasant time together.�
“He had left his lady’s-maid behind, I presume?� hinted the listener.
“He had,� said Bonson. “When he got back to London, though, Mariette met him with a shriek. ‘Heavens!’ cried she, throwing up her hands, ‘the figure of Monsieur—the silhouette on which he justly prided himself, where—where has it gone? Hélas! those beautiful clothes that have arrived from the tailor’s during the absence of Monsieur—jamais de la viewill he be able to get into them,j’en suis babain contemplating the extraordinaryembonpointof Monsieur.’
“‘Hang it, Mariette!’ said Shelmadine, quite shocked; ‘am I so beastly bulged as all that comes to?’ Mariette broke down at that, and went into floods of tears. Ittook the best part of a bottle of Cognac to bring her round, and then Shelmadine set about overhauling his wardrobe.�
“Nothing would meet, I presume?� hinted the man who had been listening.
“Not by three finger-breadths,� said the man who was telling the story. “Plowondllellm Wells in North Wales has got a kind of reputation for making stout kine lean. Shelmadine got extension of leave on account of bereavement....�
“When a man loses his figure he may be said to be bereaved!� nodded the listener.
“Shelmadine tried the Wells, without success. All he ate was weighed out in ounces, all he drank measured out with the most grudging care; nothing was allowed to enter his system that contained anything conducive to the accumulation of the hated tissue, but nothing could keep him from putting it on!�
“Poor brute!� said the hearer.
“He had gone to the Wells a distinctly roundabout figure. He came back a potty young man! Despair preyed upon his vitals without reducing his bulk, however. He saw ‘Slimaline’ advertised.�
“I know,� said the listener. “A harmless vegetable compound which reduces the bulkiest middle-aged human figure of either sex in the course of a few weeks to the slender proportions of graceful youth. Three-and-sixpence a bottle, sent secretly packed, to any address in the United Kingdom.Bis!�
“He then,� continued the narrator, “went in for ‘Frosher’s Fat-Reducing Soap.’ Perhaps you are not acquainted with that compound, which is rubbed briskly into the—ah—the——�
“Personality,� put in the other man.
“... Until a strong lather is obtained. The lather proved ineffectual; Shelmadine took to stays.�
“Phew!� puffed the other man.
The first man continued:
“As the weary weeks went on he was compelled to return to his desk at Whitehall—crouching in a taxicab to avoid observation. But concealment was useless. From the Department allotted to the Second Division Higher-Grade clerks the secret crept out, and Society pounced upon it and tore it to shreds, shrieking.�
“Like ’em,� said the listener—“like ’em!�
“That night, as Shelmadine sat in his dainty dressing-room surrounded by mountains of costly and elegant clothes, which, though only of the previous season’s make, would no longer accommodate his proportions,� went on Bonson—“lounging clothes, shooting clothes, walking clothes of all descriptions—London did not contain a wretcheder man. The exquisitely chosen waist-coats, the taffetas shirts of the once slim dandy of the War Office—a world too narrow for the fat man who now represented him were in piles about him. Dozens of lovely gloves in all the newest shades—squirrel-gray, dead-leaf yellow, Havana-brown, chrysanthemum-buff—were scattered around by the hands that were now too stout to wear them. Piles of boots—afternoon boots, with uppers of corduroy leather, gray, fawn, or the white antelope, emblematical of the blameless pattern of virtue; walking boots, shooting boots, and shoes of all descriptions; slippers in heliotrope, rose-petal pink, and lizard-skin green, obscured the furniture. The pedal extremities that had bulged beyond all reasonable limits must now be accommodated in large Number Nines. Even Shelmadine’s dressing gowns—foulard silk, lined with cashmere—had declined to contain him.�
“’Pon my word, you make me sorry for the idiot,� said the listener; “mere clothes-peg, as he seems to have been!�
“Suicide—the thought of suicide had occurred to him.�
“He ought to have swallowed a set of enamel evening buttons or a set of five jeweled tie-pins,� suggested the listener, “and taken leave of the world in an appropriate manner.�
“I won’t go so far as to say that he would not have done something desperate,� continued the man who was telling the story, “had not Mariette—who may or may not have suspected that things were getting to a desperate pitch—appeared upon the scene. ‘Poor lamb! thou art in despair’—thus she addressed Shelmadine in the affectionate idiom with which her native language abounds—‘confide in Mariette, who alone can restore the silhouette that seems for ever lost to thee. Seems only, Monsieur; for at the bidding of me, myself, it will return. A little condition is attached to the recovery of thy figure, my child—not to be carried out if I cannot be as good as my word.Passe moi la casse, je te passerai le séné.All I want, Monsieur, is senna for my rhubarb—your written promise to marry Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, druggist of Geneva, if within three months you recover your beautiful figure. What do you say? Is it a bargain? Will you be fat and free, or slim and no longer single? Speak, then! You agree?Pour sûr!I thought you would!’�
“And did he marry his lady’s-maid?� asked the listening man quite eagerly.
“He did not,� said the teller of the tale, “though he was very near it. Fortunately for Shelmadine, the girl he had met on the Dolomittenweg Promenade steppedin. She was an American, original, independent, and determined. When Shelmadine wrote—on Ordnance Office paper—to her in Paris, saying that Fate had stepped in between them, and that she never could be his, she asked the reason why. Not getting a satisfactory answer, she ran over to London to see for herself ... bringing her mother—a vast person, who wore a diamond tiara, mittens, and diamond shoulder-straps in the evening, and carried them in a hip-bag by day—with her.�
“The American mother is an appendage,� said the listener, “rather than a necessity.�
“The sight of Shelmadine, who had expanded like a balloon in the filling-shed since the happy days at Klümpenstein, was to Miss Van Kyper—Miss Mamie Van Kyper was her complete name,� went on the man who had been called Bonson—“an undoubted shock.�
“Of course,� agreed the man who was being told the story.
“They met at the Carlton Hotel, where she had engaged a suite of reception-rooms for the interview.�
“Not being quite certain whether one would hold Shelmadine?� suggested the other.
“And the matter was thrashed out satisfactorily in five minutes, where an English girl would have taken five weeks. ‘I guess there’s a good deal more of you than ever either of us expected there would be,’ said Mamie; ‘but I’ve got to choose between having too much of the man I love, or nothing at all. And it seems mighty unreasonable—when I felt plum-sure at Klümpenstein that I could never have enough of you—that I should be miserable here in London because there happens to be a good deal more than there was then.’ With a gush of warm and affectionate devotion she twinedher arms as far round Shelmadine as they would go, and he, in accepting the fate that made him the husband of Miss Mamie Van Kyper, renounced his silhouette for ever!�
“But you said he got it back again!� said the second man.
“He has,� said the first man.
“Without the assistance of Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, herbalist, of Geneva?� queried the second man.
“Mariette,� said the first man, “on finding Shelmadine indisposed to accept her offer, first attempted to commit suicide in a cistern; then threw up the sponge and made a clean breast of everything. A peculiar vegetable preparation, the secret of which she had had from her father, the herbalist of Geneva, administered in Shelmadine’s food, had caused the extraordinary accumulation of adipose tissue. The antidote, which she had promised to administer in the intervals of her own designs on my poor friend’s freedom, she confided to him, with bitter tears and many entreaties for forgiveness, before she went out of the Bond Street flat and Shelmadine’s life for ever.�
“He married Miss Van Kyper immediately. He has an Assistant-Principal clerkship at the Ordnance Office; he has recovered his silhouette, but he no longer cares for clothes. You could scare rooks with him as he dresses now. Fact!�
“Facts are confoundedly rummy things!� said the man who had been told the story.