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BY
WITH 18 ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. BERNARD PARTRIDGE
PHILADELPHIA
J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1893
PRINTED BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA,
U.S.A.
THE first one--the very first one? Well, I think it was a
sallow, under-sized Italian with handsome ox-eyes, who used to give us
violin lessons; or else it was a cousin, a boy with sandy hair, who
stammered, and who was reading for the army; but, no, I rather think it was
the anxious young doctor, who came when I had the measles--anyhow,
he, the primeval one, is lost in the mists of antiquity...
A great many people come to our house, and they have always done so as
long as I can recollect. Father is a Royal Academician, and paints shocking
bad portraits, but the British public is quite unaware of the fact. The
British public likes to be painted by a Royal Academician, so it pays large
prices and is hung on the line in the big room at Burlington House. They
all come; red-faced, red-coated M.F.H.'s, the bejewelled wives of
Manchester millionaires, young beauties, heads of colleges, the celebrities
of the day--they all sit, with the same fixed eyes and the same tight
smile, on the dais in our gorgeous studio.
The studio is an imposing room. Father likes me to sit in the alcove
with the golden mosaics, on a peach-coloured divan, with turquoise-blue
cushions; and on Show Sunday Christina is seen in a little white gown in
the oaken gallery, playing dreamy voluntaries on the organ.... It looks
idyllic, and nobody knows that there has usually been a family row shortly
before the people begin crowding in. Christina is tart of tongue, and is
not to be put
down by a mere parent. But I was speaking of the studio. There is a perfection of detail about the vast apartment which is impressive; indeed, so fascinating a workshop has father fashioned for himself, that I have seen a dozen people inspecting the brocades and spindle-legged tables, and forgetting to look at the pictures on the easels. The over-worked critics, too, about the beginning of April, are apt to gush inordinately over a Nankin bowl full of daffodils, while they turn their backs on a portrait that has taken the best part of a year to paint. We live in a nest of artists. Next door they paint Oriental subjects, and hire a dusky Arab--more or less genuine--who wears a turban, and opens the front door at tea-parties. A dozen yards farther up the street they supply the thoroughly English idyl--young ladies in white muslin sitting on September lawns; young gentlemen in riding-breeches, who are either accepted or rejected. Just opposite they do sea-pictures--the old woman shading her eyes with her hand; the young woman in despair, with the careless infant at her knee. And all the houses are of red brick, with gables and
white-wood balconies, and queer little windows in unexpected places. Our front doors are painted a pale sea-green, with brass knockers and bell-handles. On Show Sunday the British public wanders in and out, sublimely ignorant of whether it is in the house of Smith, R.A., or Robinson, A.R.A. And yet ours is the only studio with an Organ.
During the season we give Sunday dinner-parties, followed by an open
evening, and we also entertain the 'sitters' at lunch. Some of
the sitters have been known to want to hear me play the violin. I play
execrably, but they are too polite to say so. All this rather bores
Christina, whose latest hobby--Socialism--takes up most of her
time.
Christina can be, on occasion, almost brutally cynical; but then she is
clever, and when I want to get out of a scrape I go to her. Mother would
not be of the faintest use under such circumstances. She would get pink and
flurried, and tell me 'that she married my father at seventeen, and
settled down after that,' and would further inform me that she had
'no patience with such philandering.' Poor mother, I really
pity her limited experience.
.. It must be like eternally dining off roast mutton to marry at seventeen, and settle down dully and respectably for the rest of your natural life!
I was christened Margaret, but most people call me Peggy. It is a
curious fact that all my friends call me by different names. Some call me
Miss Wynman, others Margaret; while 'Miss Peggy' and
'Peggy' do duty more often. One young man--but he was an
American--always addressed me as 'Peggy Wynman'--a
form of appellation, by-the-bye, which usually prefaced a lecture. Gilbert
Mandell called me Marguerite.
Gilbert Mandell is one of the 'dear departed.' Not that he
is dead. Oh no! I call them the 'dear departed' when it is all
over, and they have betaken themselves to India, or Japan, or the East End
to work among the People.
It is not flattering to one's vanity, but it must be frankly owned
that, as a rule, my admirers 'depart' with phenomenal celerity.
Their devotion generally lasts from six weeks to three months. Why this
thing should be I cannot tell. Some people say it is because I don't
let them talk about themselves.
I really think Christina objected less to Gilbert Mandell than to any of
those who have come after him. If he savoured slightly of the prig, she
maintained, he was neither a knave nor a fool. Christina doesn't care
for young men.
My principal objection to him was that he was associated in my
imagination with drains. Of course one cannot help the particular way in
which one's parent has made a fortune, but, considering his son's
taste for smart society and intellectual pursuits, it was thoughtless of
Mandell père to poke his
'Deodorising Powder' in one's eye at every turn. Poor
young man, how he must have suffered! 'Mandell's superior pink
carbolic disinfectant powder' screamed at you, so to speak, at every
street corner. The legend of its multifarious virtues was writ large on
every omnibus. It flared, in connection with a plump lady in full ball
costume, from every hoarding.
Of course there were lots of people, even when he was at Cambridge, who
knew nothing of the Deodoriser. But it always hung, like a modern sword of
Damocles, over poor Gilbert's head. It made him diffident where he
should
have been at ease; it made him malicious when it would have been to his social advantage to appear kindly. But even at Cambridge he had given unmistakable signs of being a Superior Person. He could repeat, to a nicety, the shibboleth of Superior People. He knew when to let fall a damaging phrase about the poetical fame of Mr. Lewis Morris, and when to insinuate a paradox about the great and only Stendhal. In art, he generally spoke of Velasquez and Degas; in music, only the tetralogies at Bayreuth were worth discussion.
Mr. Mandell was a pessimist. That was what attracted me first, for at
seventeen a girl is always impressed by any cynical man of the world who
will notice her. And Gilbert Mandell noticed me a good deal. He said I was
'suggestive'--whatever that meant--and that my mind
was 'receptive.' And then he began to lend me books by Mr.
Walter Pater, which I remember perplexed me very much. He also sent me
George Meredith's novels; and there was even a volume of Schopenhauer,
I remember, which I used to pretend I had read.
In appearance he was a middle-sized man of thirty-four, with rather pink
cheeks, and a slightly bald forehead. His hands were fleshy and white, and
had exquisitely pared and polished nails. A manicure usually attended to
his hands. He always had the newest scandal; and sometimes, when he was
going to say something specially malicious, he hesitated a little in his
speech, not from any false shame, but because he was so delighted with what
he was going to say. For the rest, he was always beautifully dressed, and
generally affected fashions which were coming in. He had two secret
ambitions: to dine with a duchess, and to write an article in the
Contemporary Review.
Looking back at it now, it strikes me that Gilbert Mandell had quaint
notions about amusing a young girl. He used to take us for long afternoons
at the South Kensington Museum, where we gazed at Persian tiles, and
Japanese ivories, and illuminated missals until my eyes ached, and
Christina roundly declared she wouldn't stay another minute. Then
Gilbert would look at us from under his drooping eyelids with a surprised
little stare. He was never tired of art. And how Christina was
bored! She came from a stern sense of duty, and because, as she frankly said, the 'thing wouldn't do.' Poor Christina, she was destined to see many such as Mr. Gilbert Mandell come and go. Other days it would be the National Gallery--he never went inside modern exhibitions of pictures in London--where I learnt a good deal about Velasquez and Holbein and Franz Hals. It is from that period that my suspicion dates that father does not know how to paint pictures.
He came to our house a good deal. Father laughed at his clothes and his
manners, but said he was a 'sharp fellow'; while mother was
amused with his little stories about smart society, into which, by great
assiduity, he had managed to effect a sort of entrance. In Mayfair they
knew nothing of the Deodoriser. Mandell senior lived in a mansion in
Surrey, where he cultivated orchids and pineapples, and the world knew
nothing of him. The son, on the other hand, had charming rooms in St.
James's, where he gave frequent tea-parties, which were sparsely
attended by a handful of modish women, interlarded with thin, youngish-old
men, who spent their lives criticising the
critics, and whose claim to immortality lay in a memoir of Lamb or Coleridge. Somehow or other, these parties were not hilarious. The elements did not mix, and Mr. Mandell was a somewhat flurried, nervous host. The day that an ambassadress came to tea his distraction was almost painful. Gilbert Mandell was an example of that extremely modern mixture, a man of fashion and a critic; indeed, his respect for smart women was only equalled by his adoration for the log-rollers of the Saturday Review.
I have never made out to this day why he noticed me. Christina says he
must have had a depraved taste for school-girls, or else he thought by
taking the raw material of a woman, so to speak, he might fashion a
companion to his taste. He tried hard to cultivate my mind. He was always
writing to me. That was another odd thing about Gilbert Mandell. An
ordinary young man looks upon pens and paper with deep-rooted suspicion and
distrust. I have had more than one flirtation carried on solely by
telegram. But Mr. Mandell was always writing me long epistles, very
carefully worded, and in a semi-literary style.
I remember I was very proud of those letters. They flattered me in a young girl's most vulnerable point; they implied that my opinion was worth having. I don't know whether it was that, or his pronounced pessimism, which attracted me most. He was also fond of implying--as he pointed out, with a white hand, some masterpiece of the Florentine school, or sat murmuring paradoxes over the tea-table--that there were places and things which we should see, in the future, together.
'There is a little town in Italy--Orvieto,' he said,
one afternoon, when Christina and I had been listening to a disquisition on
the Renaissance, 'where I must take you one day, Marguerite. You must
see the façade of the cathedral. Orvieto is an education in
art.'
It long remained vague. But one day--it was a very wet day, I
remember, and we were coming back in a hansom from the National
Gallery--he alluded in a roundabout sort of way to an organ he was
pleased to call his heart. Then it struck me all at once that it was
impossible. It was not the Deodoriser that I minded. I think it was the
pinkness of his nails and a certain complaisant way which
he had of regarding me which irritated me when it came to a question of a life-long interview.
I suppose I must have said 'No,' and possibly with some
fervour. Smiling vaguely, he took my hand. He evidently did not believe
me.
'I won't hurry you, dear child,' he said, as he left me
on my own doorstep. 'You will think it over--you will be able to
make up your mind by-and-by.'
But I never made up my mind that I wanted to marry Mr. Mandell.
Not long after he came to say that he was going abroad. At first he
wrote pretty often, and, as usual, his letters were semi-literary, though
to be sure the 'burning question' was discussed from various
points of view. But, to my relief, the letters got more and more literary
as time went on, and finally they stopped altogether.
We neither of us took each other seriously, and that added a certain
charm to the thing.
Everybody at home liked Tony, except, I think, Christina, who said she couldn't understand his slang, and that he made a draught in the drawing-room, he was so boisterous and restless. The family saw a good deal of him in those days, for he was being painted in parade dress, and he used to stay to lunch so as to be able to pose again in the afternoon.
I remember the first time he came in with father, pink with
mortification at being seen in his uniform in the daytime out of barracks.
Whence comes, I wonder, the love of mufti so deeply implanted in the breast
of the British officer? Tony, fortunately, learnt to forget his early sense
of discomfiture, and spent many merry half-hours in our little study when
he had done sitting, singing soldiers' songs with a fearful and
wonderful accompaniment of his own invention, while the dogs chased each
other, barking joyously, over the sofas and chairs. How he used to light up
the dim little twilight room with his scarlet bravery and his irrepressible
spirits!
Mr. Anthony Lamnbert was the eldest son of Norfolk People. One day or
other he would come into possession of a fine old house, some
excellent shooting, and three thousand a year--an income by no means large enough to keep up the Towers. Therefore it was an understood thing, especially by Lady Marion, his mamma, that Tony, when he married, was to marry money. In the meantime Tony was to be painted, first to adorn the next exhibition at Burlington House, and afterwards the collection of family portraits at the Towers. So that in this way the boy, in spite of Lady Marion's precautions, came directly under the influence of a most undesirable young person, to wit, myself.
Tony was a lieutenant in a line regiment, and I fear his high spirits
made him have occasional differences of opinion with his colonel. In
appearance he was distinctly good to look at. He had a clean, pink skin,
twinkling blue eyes, and hair so flaxen that it was almost silver. His
shoulders were broad and square, he had a delightful laugh, and he was just
three-and-twenty. And, without being in the least conceited, Tony was
thoroughly pleased with himself, his regiment, and his belongings. He had,
in a supreme degree, the magnetism which comes of perfect health, good
spirits, and complete self-satisfaction.
What an infectious thing is happiness, and what a golden age is
three-and-twenty! With what vigour did Tony play lawn-tennis, how excited
he got over races and cricket matches, how hot he became when he danced,
what portentous suppers he could eat! ... The very sound of his voice in
the hall--a voice with raised inflections, for the ends of Tony's
sentences always finished joyously--roused one up on the foggiest and
dreariest of days.
To go for a walk in the park or along Piccadilly with Tony Lambert was a
whole education in itself in the ways of young men: his joy was so manifest
when a pretty face, a showy figure, or even a well-cut gown appeared in
sight. He had the omnivorous glance which takes in every detail, and which
is the prerogative of men who spend most of their leisure in sport. Seldom
will you find a writer, a lawyer, or a scientist with the faculty of
observation as highly cultivated as in the most brainless individual used
to the rod and the gun.
Tony, by-the-bye, was one of the young men with whom I corresponded by
electric telegraph. As a matter of fact, I do not
possess a scrap of his handwriting. Whether he was doubtful of his prowess in grammar and spelling, or whether it was a bit of worldly wisdom beyond his years, will remain for ever a mystery, but Christina got quite tired of those agitated pulls of the bell which announced the telegraph boy, while at this period orange-coloured envelopes were served up to me at every hour of the day.
There was nothing he didn't offer us, from invitations to military
balls, to bags of American candy. To me especially he offered a great many
photographs of himself, in various degrees of military splendour, which
gave my room, for the time being, quite a spirited and martial air. Of
course this didn't last long, for my photograph frames and space to
put them are limited, whereas my friends are many, and in the course of
years one frame contains many 'counterfeit presentments.'
Christina says that, if I have a heart, it must be like my photograph
frames....
From what I could gather, Mr. Lambert was never in love with fewer than
three ladies at a time. He was like one of the modern monster shopkeepers,
a sort of universal
admirer of the fairer sex. And yet one never blamed him for it, perhaps because he was so perfectly candid in his enthusiasms. As far as I could make out, the fair with whom I shared his affections at this time were his Major's wife--a person with fluffy hair, an exaggerated figure, and a well-worn smile--and an individual whose acquaintance, it appeared, he had not yet succeeded in making, but who occupied a distinguished position in the second row of the Gaiety chorus. It was always amusing to get Tony on to the subject of his loves. The 'little friends' that he 'played with' seemed to have been of all ages and sizes, and his amorous difficulties appeared to have been numerous. Once already had his family offered a substantial sum to a young lady in the Camberwell Road as a substitute for Tony's hand; but that, as he acknowledged with a pink and rueful countenance, had been in 'his gay and giddy youth.' Having now arrived at the discreet age of three-and-twenty, he was resolved to mend his ways. And to begin well, he proceeded, in his airy and irresponsible way, to imagine that he cared about me.
I wonder what Lady Marion would have said of the three months that
followed?
Tony took his 'long leave' on January 1st, and it was at
this time, being a good deal in London, that he sat for his portrait. For
the next two months Christina and I were never sure when he would not burst
into our den with his joyous laugh and a couple of excited dogs wagging
delighted tails, with some project of rushing us off somewhere or other in
search of amusement. What would Lady Marion have said to all this, I
wonder; and of those many accidental meetings in Bond Street, when we used
to drop in at the minor exhibitions, and come out sublimely unconscious of
whether we had been looking at Van Beers or Gustave Doré? Or of the
pompous dances in Queen's Gate to which mother allowed me to take the
boy, and where he met, I believe for the first time in his life, the youth
and loveliness of South Kensington? Tony had met 'county' girls
and 'garrison' girls and Gaiety girls, but I don't think
he had ever before danced with a London middle-class damsel. Lady Marion, I
verily believe, would have preferred the young person in the Camberwell
Road.
But our last dance was not to be in Queen's Gate. The regiment was
ordered to the Curragh, and Tony was in despair. Nothing would do but we
must come to the regiment's farewell ball at Mulchester, and it was
there, in the long, low rooms of the Officers' Mess, against a
background of flags and military trophies, that I saw Tony's blonde
head for the last time.... The pretty scene comes back to me now--the
glare of scarlet coats among the flesh-tones of the women; the
delicate-tinted tulle dresses against a bank of pink azaleas and palms; the
blue uniforms of the Gunners and the green of the Rifles striking a sombre
note in the gay chord of colour; the intimate sadness of those valse
refrains which the band of the regiment played; and over all that acute
atmosphere of mixed pain and pleasure which is associated--when one is
eighteen--with the words 'for the last time.'
It was my first soldiers' ball. How well I remember the whole
atmosphere of that night: the Colonel, smiling, urbane, and slightly
indifferent; the Colonel's wife, a lady with protruding teeth and
neatly-parted hair, who was said to be wealthy; the eager young faces of
the junior subalterns as they surrounded some showy beauty; the heavy-jawed Captain to whom I was introduced on my entry, and who deserted me at once for a buxom lady with dubious hair and many diamonds.... Oh, those military ladies! How dashing, how much too dashing, they were; what drawn-in waists, what liberal smiles, what suspiciously white shoulders! How pert and off-hand they seemed in public, and how confiding they looked in obscure corners down back passages, where Tony's straw-coloured hair and scarlet coat were to be seen often during that night. Heaven has not been pleased to inflict on me a suspicious disposition, or I fear I should have passed but an indifferently amusing evening. For Mr. Anthony Lambert, with the gay insouciance of youth, had thoughtlessly invited some half-dozen of his 'loves,' and his Major's wife, it appeared, was inordinately jealous.
Some fifteen years ago this lady had been described in a local newspaper
as a 'magnificent blonde,' and she had been living up to the
epithet ever since. She had all the airs of a beauty, and she seemed to
regard Mr. Lambert as her especial property. At ten o'clock I
heard her reproaching him for only wanting three dances; at one o'clock she deliberately fetched him out of a balcony where he was saying good-bye to a pretty little girl with red hair.... I don't wonder that Tony looked harassed; the smile of his Major's wife was terrifying. Poor boy! I, at least, had never worried or reproached him, and I think he was proportionately grateful at the last. It was a black night and pouring rain, I remember, when we finally drove away, but I could see that Tony's blue eyes looked unspeakable things as we whispered a final hurried good-bye at the carriage door.
One morning, a few months later, we read in the paper that a marriage
had been arranged, and would take place immediately, between Mr. Anthony
Lambert of the Blankshire Regiment, eldest son of Mr. and Lady Marion
Lambert of the Towers, Sleepington, Norfolk, and Katherine, eldest daughter
of Patrick O'Flaherty, Esq., of Dublin. He had been taken seriously by
a garrison beauty a dozen years older than himself. Although they have
already three children, I hear that Lady Marion refuses to see her
enterprising Irish daughter-
in-law, and now the regiment is in India. Poor Tony! He was born, it would appear, to be the sport of the less amiable members of our sex. His Major's wife is, of course, with the regiment, and people say that Mrs. Anthony Lambert is primitively jealous. A ridiculous song that he used to strum always occurs to me when I think of him, for the refrain
Woman, lovely woman!
epitomises the tragi-comedy of his blameless little life.
hospitality Mr. Price had--among people who didn't know him well.
One of his least agreeable idiosyncrasies was his curious distrust of
everybody. He was always in dread of being, as he would have expressed it,
'done.' So suspicious, indeed, was he, that he even suspected
himself. His coups on the Stock Exchange, the
bouquet he had offered over-night, the very wine he drank, suggested the
after-thought that he had made a fool of himself--that it was possible
he might not yet get the desired return for his money. His small red-lidded
eyes, of a watery blue, continually betrayed this recurring idea, while his
loosely-hung jaw and mouth gave signs of a loquacious temperament, which
his frequent and abrupt laugh did not succeed in making genial.
Though he did not mention it in polite society, Mr. Hanbury Price hailed
from Tulse Hill. In that eminently respectable suburb he had first seen the
light, and in the same stucco mansion there still resided his mother and a
bevy of plain unmarried sisters, to whom he used to journey down to partake
of early dinner on Sundays. 'Never mention Tulse Hill to
smart people,' he confided to me one day with one of his sudden and unmirthful laughs; 'if I do, they want to know if it's in Yorkshire.'
He was curiously anxious to be voted popular--at least among the
right sort of people--and was fond of alluding, in an airy way, to the
parties he had given or intended to give; but as he had an inherent dislike
to laying out half-a-crown on anything which was not strictly necessary,
Mr. Price must have undergone untold tortures--if, indeed, these
festivities ever really came off--in his efforts to be classed among
the bachelors who entertain. Of course, it was only in time that I became
aware of all these amiable little peculiarities, for at first sight Mir.
Price gave one the impression of being a good-natured, talkative, and
gregarious member of society, with an inclination for giving little dinners
and theatre parties.
We met him first on a Saturday-to-Monday on the river, at the house of a
vulgar little woman whose portrait father was painting. Mrs. Bodley-Gallard
was loud in his praises; she had, it transpired, only known Mr. Hanbury
Price a fortnight. Our hostess was one of those over-officious people who
say things that make
one's blood run cold. 'Now, my dear Miss Wynman,' she whispered to me on Sunday night after dinner, 'please be nice to the poor young man.' Mrs. Bodley-Gallard belonged to the class of person who calls everybody a 'young man' who still is unmarried, even though he be on the wrong side of fifty. 'I assure you he is devoted--quite devoted. Now promise me you'll think about it!' A speech which had the effect of making me extremely rude to Mr. Price when he joined me after dinner, and it was only when he had seen us into our cab at Paddington station next morning that I mentioned, after he had made repeated enquiries on the subject, that we were generally at home at five o'clock.
He was not long in coming, and when he appeared he was profuse in his
invitations. Would we do a theatre? would we dine with him? He was thinking
of taking a house on the river for August; he hoped that mother would bring
us down to stay with him.
The least we could do was to accept his offer for the play. We were to
dine somewhere first, and the party was arranged for the following Tuesday.
But when Tuesday
arrived, there was a post-card from Mr. Price to say that the proposed festivity was postponed, and, as I afterwards found out, because he had been vainly soliciting free admissions for the Thalia Theatre from a young man whom he knew, who played the footman in the first piece. Then, when the night at last arrived, we found we were to partake of a three-and-sixpenny table d'hôte dinner, with a maddening accompaniment of glees; and this from a man who talked continually of the Amphitryon and the Bachelors' Club. That damped my spirits to begin with. Of course, when one is under twenty, one does not care much for the niceties of cooking and the brand of the champagne; but it is lowering to one's dignity, in the eyes of one's family, to be asked to dine at table d'hôte with travelling Yankees and gaping provincials. But it was nothing to what followed.
We were a party of five--mother and I, and a couple of men beside
our host. When we were at last landed inside the doors of the Thalia, we
found that Mr. Hanbury Price had secured seats for his party in the fourth
row of the dress circle. The two other men ex-
changed amused and surprised glances; mother and I declared we much preferred the dress circle to a box or stalls; and Mr. Price, who began to dimly discern that for once his economy was ill-timed, spent half his evening in the lobby, having, as I shrewdly suspect, a prolonged altercation with the attendant on the subject of a charge of sixpence for each programme.
It grieves me to think what we must have cost Mr. Hanbury Price in
hansoms, for our house, as he more than once explained, is inconveniently
situated for omnibuses. Whether he really imagined himself to be in love I
have never been able to decide, but he was obviously haunted by dreadful
forebodings as to the expense of a young lady with my tastes and
proclivities. He used to lecture me about taking care of my gowns, and
suggested that I was recklessly extravagant in the matter of feather boas
and shoes.... One day he tried to persuade me to attend the cookery classes
at South Kensington; and another evening, when he was unusually
sentimental, he asked me if I didn't like the neighbourhood of Notting
Hill? All this contributed to
Christina's joy, for Mr. Price's struggles between economy and the tender passion were really diverting to behold.
I think, perhaps, when I look back at the whole affair dispassionately,
that it was the box of chocolates that ended Mr. Hanbury Price's
dream. One afternoon, when he had been particularly confidential, he asked
me, at parting, if I cared for sweets. The next day there arrived from the
Civil Service Stores a small cardboard box of second-rate chocolate creams,
addressed to me--to me, who had had qualms of conscience that he might
have telegraphed to Paris for some elaborate offering from the Boulevard
des Italiens. Telegraphed, indeed! Hanbury Price was not the man to waste
his money in telegrams, when a letter, or, better still, a halfpenny
postcard, would answer the same purpose. I have quite a collection of
postcards in his handwriting, for he wrote often on every sort of matter,
and he chiefly used the cheapest means of communication. There is the mass
of postcards, for instance, which relates to the famous dinner at the
Crystal Palace, which finally ended the affair.
We tried hard to get out of it, Christina and I, but it was of no avail,
and in the end we had to go. Mrs. Bodley-Gallard was to be the chaperon,
and there were to be one or two other men. I like to go over the events of
that day, for they are unique in my history.
Five o'clock was the hour of meeting at Victoria Station. It was
high midsummer, and bitterly cold and damp. Arrived at the station, we
found that Mr. Price had already taken second-class tickets for the whole
party, but that he was not above recouping himself from our purses for this
outlay. 'Just as jolly second-class,' declared our host,
'if you're a party, don't you know;' though he
laughed awkwardly when he found that a couple of damp, plush-clad babies,
with their respective mammas, were also to journey down with us to
Sydenham. Of course we arrived too early, and wandered about on the
interminable and dubious boards of the Palace among pieces of greasy
paper--the remnants of recent feasts--until seven
o'clock.
But dinner came at last--with a lengthy harangue as to which table
Mr. Price had selected, an interview with the manager, and
some sour Sauterne-cup. Only one young man had turned up (the other two had probably dined with Mr. Price before), and he chaffed our host into ordering a beverage more suitable to the damp night; but even that failed to revive the flagging spirits of the party. Mournful pauses fell, and Hanbury Price's eye travelled anxiously after the champagne bottle as it went its way round the table. Even Mrs. Bodley-Gallard could not pretend that she was enjoying herself. And then, with the phenomenally hard peaches and dried figs, came the final blow. There were to be fireworks, but our host had evidently no intention of offering us covered seats from which to view them. 'One of you young ladies will come with me in the grounds,' urged the ever-economical Hanbury, casting a sentimental and meaning glance in my direction. 'I'm afraid I've caught cold already,' I said with decision. And then Christina, with true nobility, came to my rescue, in answer to my appealing nudge: 'I will, if you like,' she said, quickly; 'Peggy can't wander about in the dark and the cold tonight. She's nearly got bronchitis as it is; the child must stay indoors.'
The only young man at once secured seats for the chaperon and myself,
and Mr. Hanbury Price spent what he may have intended to be the eventful
night of his life wandering about the grounds, under a dripping umbrella,
with my sister. Christina's account of the evening is extremely
diverting. I shall always be grateful to her for that night. Whatever
differences may arise between us in after years, I shall never forget from
what an awkward interview Christina saved me.
And he, for his part, had a chastened air in the railway-carriage coming
home.
We left town very soon after, and when I meet Mr. Hanbury Price on rare
occasions in the Park, or at some crowded party, I get ready my sweetest
and most deceitful smile. But Mr. Hanbury Price invariably looks the other
way.
It was at Oxford, at Commemoration, that I saw him first. He was lying
on his back on the grass in one of those small, meagre gardens in the Parks
which make the joy of Oxford dons and their wives, and their troops of
babies. As a matter of fact, he was being photographed--we were all
being photographed--as is the pleasing custom during Commemoration
week. We had gone to pay a call on the Talford Browns--Talford Brown
is the most eminent authority on the Phoenician language in
Oxford--and we had been at once taken
into the garden, where tea and the photographer's camera awaited us. There we found the usual Oxford group: the lady with smooth hair and clinging gown, one or two vague, bearded Fellows or tutors, the girl in a pince-nez and badly-made boots, a couple of small boys, two babies, three dogs, and--Frank. Flat on his back, as I said before; his six foot one of length arrayed in virgin flannels and a Trinity College blazer.
Frank Harding was one of those exceptional beings, an undergraduate on
easy--nay, even familiar--terms with dons. The wives of these
gentlemen were very tolerant of Frank--indeed, if it were given to a
don's wife to be capable of a flirtation, I am pretty sure they would
have flirted with him. As it was, he strolled in and out of those villas in
Norham Gardens very much as he liked, played with the babies, teased the
dogs, and helped the ladies of the house in their perennial little
difficulties with the Greek syntax. In spite of his eccentricities and
those daring caricatures of the dons of his which regularly appeared in
Shrimpton's window, the authorities all liked Frank, and everybody was
ready to bet--if
one can picture such a transaction taking place in a college common-room--that Frank would take a First.
We stayed to dinner at the Talford Browns, and we were much struck with
the somewhat affected simplicity of the Oxford interior. There was a long
table, sparsely decorated with attenuated glass flower-holders, in each of
which were placed three Iceland poppies. Mrs. Talford Brown, who had the
reputation of being a wit, and was understood to say scathing things about
the undergraduates, herself carved the cold mutton which formed the
principal dish at dinner. Professor Talford Brown drank toast-and-water. We
had a salad, with a trifle too much vinegar, and we talked a good deal of
the higher education of women, and of the recent finals for honours which
had just come off. Christina sat next to the Professor, and I could see
that our host and hostess were as much taken with her as it is possible for
Oxford people to be with a mere Londoner; and this was an inexpressible
relief to me, for every minute I felt that I was falling lower in their
regard. An irresistible impulse seized me to say
frivolous things, to giggle in an imbecile manner, and to ask Mrs. Talford Brown if she had ever been to the Empire? Do what I may in the after years, I know that I shall ever be regarded with contempt in those Oxford circles in which 'plain living and high thinking' obtain. But Frank Harding, who sat next to me, by no means shared this opinion. To begin with, we recollected that we were, so to speak, old friends. We remembered that it had taken two nurses and a governess to make peace between us some fifteen years ago, when we had met at a children's party and found no favour in each other's eyes. The Hardings, indeed, were connections of my mother's, so that we had seen Frank now and then up to the trying age of eight; but after that they had gone to live in the country, and we had lost sight of them for years. But on the strength of my having pulled his hair some dozen years ago, Frank, in his unconventional and airy way, insisted on calling us 'Christina' and 'Peggy.'
After dinner, Mrs. Talford Brown went up to put the twins to
bed--nothing was ever allowed to interfere with this domestic
rite--
and then we all sat in the ugly little square garden, and watched a great yellow moon travel slowly up the sky. And Frank Harding talked. He was as far removed from the ordinary football-playing young man as it is possible to be. To begin with, his father was a poet--one of our finest latter-day lyrists--and it was from him that he inherited all his sympathy, his feminine intuitions, and his charmingly impracticable theories. At present, of course, he was only a clever, somewhat lanky boy; but his beautiful grey eyes made him almost handsome, and his perfectly easy manners were curiously attractive. He had the wildest ideas, and was the sort of man who might found a new religion, commit a murder, devote a lifetime to the East End, or take away his neighbour's wife and write a book to prove that his action was justified. Some years have passed since then, but I shall never be astonished to hear anything of Frank Harding, except that he had gone into the City and was paying taxes in Bayswater.
We saw a great deal of Frank in the days that followed. To enjoy
Commemoration, one must be twenty and never have stayed in
Oxford before. It was astonishing how much we managed to get into that week, and how much of Frank's society we had.... There were lazy mornings, punting on the Cherwell, and picnics to Godstow and Sanford Lasher, the ball at Christ Church, and the garden-parties in the colleges, for which we put on our best frocks, and stared at the celebrities, and then hurried home to a cosy tea in our rooms, where a dozen undergraduates fought decorously for the honour of handing the tea-cups. And then the endless strawberries, the valses that were quarrelled for, the unstinted devotion of the boys....
I am old-fashioned enough to like a young man to be in love. Even if his
passion burns for someone else, one likes to see it, and it is still more
interesting when the young man expends his ardour on oneself. So Frank fell
in love with me, and I liked it.... I remember it all as if it were
yesterday.
There is the sad-coloured June day--a harmony in soft greys and
greens--when we went to pick fritillaries in Mesopotamia. It was the
day after Commemoration was over, and the narrow, willow-fringed river was
de-
serted. Afar off we could see the grey spires and towers of the University against the wide, white sky, while across the fat, buttercup-gilded meadows came the mellow, distant sound of Oxford bells. As Frank pushed the punt lazily up stream, we seemed wrapped in a mysterious green silence. We left the punt where the old chain ferry crosses the Cherwell, and plunged into the long new grass. I carried a basket for the fritillaries, and Frank had brought an empty soda-water bottle; a proceeding which puzzled me immensely, until I found that all among the abundant grass studded with June flowers there leapt and danced hundreds of tiny, nimble, gay-hearted frogs, only lately emerged from the juvenile or tadpole state. 'They are so like undergraduates!' I cried, kneeling in the long grass and stretching depredatory fingers here and there, while Frank pretended to be offended, and declared I shouldn't put any of my frogs into his soda-water bottle.... But in the end we compromised, and Frank was set to gather the queer, spotted, purplish-brown fritillaries, whilst I crammed the leaping little reptiles into our bottle.... And so the June afternoon slipped
by, until the clang of evening bells warned us it was time to turn homewards....
The next morning, when the train which conveyed us back to town steamed
out of the station, the two things I carried away with me as a remembrance
of my first Commemoration were a lapful of La France roses and the sight of
a pair of wistful grey eyes.
Frank had got permission to stay in Oxford during a part of the vacation
and work, but his work took a form which would scarcely have met with the
entire approval of his tutor, seeing that he was reading for a First in
classics. One night, a few days after, as Christina and I were dressing for
an evening party, I was handed a letter in a strange handwriting. It
contained a poem, and the poem was about myself! After Tony's
telegrams and Hanbury Price's post-cards it seemed idyllic to have a
charming, clever young man writing poems about--me! I waved the
missive triumphantly under Christina's nose, and made myself, as she
remarked, odious for the rest of the evening.
'He says I am like the morning star shining above the mists of a
murky city, and that the
birds sing sweeter at my foot-fall, and skim like Hope across life's--'
'Life's fiddlestick!' said Christina. 'Pass those
hot tongs. How you can encourage boys to write you such rubbish I
can't conceive. And we're an hour late as it is. Get on your
cloak, Peggy, and for Heaven's sake throw that drivel into the
fire.'
But I naturally did nothing of the kind, and when Frank appeared at our
house a week later, somewhat sad of mien and looking rather thin, I did my
best to cheer him up, though we neither of us said a word about the poem.
He stayed until it was time to catch the last train to Oxford, and after
that he was always appearing at unexpected moments. He used to write me odd
little abrupt notes, asking if I cared to see him? What could I say? It is
awkward to tell people that you don't wish to see them.
Besides--besides, I did want to....
It was only when it came to the stern realities of life that I took
Christina's point of view, and saw what an impossible thing it was....
I remember so well the day it was finally decided--a cold, drizzling
November afternoon. He had rushed up from the
country, where he was living now that he had left Oxford, and had been shown into the long amber-and-white drawing-room, where they had forgotten to light a fire, so that the cold winter twilight wrapped us round as we sat. Frank had taken a First, and there was some idea of his getting a Fellowship. But he did not wish to stop in Oxford, or, indeed, in England. The imperial destinies of the English race was one of his hobbies, and he asked me to give up London and go to North-Western Canada, where he wanted to start a new community. Visions of Margaret Fuller and the 'Blithedale Romance,' of Laurence Oliphant and his self-sacrificing bride, were evoked to tempt me. But I knew--I still had sense enough to know-that it was not for me....
The dreary November day had closed in before Frank rose to go. And long
after he had gone I sat on in the cold dark room. One by one the lamps
twinkled out all up the street, and a dreary piano-organ came and played
some threadbare airs from a comic opera.... Christina was very nice to me
when she found me sitting alone in the cold and the dark, for I think she
knew I had been crying....
Frank Harding has always refused to see me since that day. He writes
sometimes; the last time I heard from him he was in South Africa, and I
gathered from his letter that he considered the amalgamation, by marriage,
of the Boer race the duty of all English settlers in the Transvaal....
There are times--times when I am a little tired of the egotism and
puerile frivolity of London young men, tired of their little quarrels and
their little admirations for fashionable divinities--when I would give
worlds to see Frank stretched in my deck-chair, his grey eyes gazing into
futurity, and propounding even the most amazing of his curious social
schemes.
And he--does he ever think of those old Oxford days, days full of
cool green shadows and quick with emotion, over yonder in his home under a
torrid sky? Probably not--probably not. 'There are no fields of
amaranth on this side of the grave' some poet has wisely written;
'There is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love
repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.'
HE was curiously pretty, incredibly malicious, and indisputably
'smart,' with a nice house in Sloane Street, where he
entertained a great deal, and a little following of young gentlemen who
copied his neckties and buttonholes, and whom one sometimes saw giggling
together in corners, and calling each other by pet names. When one of them
wanted to give Val Redmond a birthday present--in that set the young
men constantly make each other little presents--he chose a silver vinaigrette, which Val took out with him to dinner all that season. And yet the boy was very far from being a fool. If he had lived in less degenerate days, and had been obliged to work for his living, he might have made a name for himself. But as it was, he only gave amusing parties; while one was haunted by misgivings if one had to leave his drawing-room early--with one's reputation behind.
When he gave dinners and Sunday lunches at his house in Sloane Street,
his aunt, Lady Marchmont, presided. To have had only men's parties
would not have suited Val. He liked the society of women, and particularly
of old women; but then his elderly female friends were invariably clever,
and some had had, in addition, an almost historical past.
'Dear Julia Calverly,' he would say of the Dowager
Countess--he had the most astounding way of talking of his elderly
dames--'I love that woman. It is as good as reading
a scandalous "Mémoire pour servir" to talk to
her.'
'Julia is very fin de
siècle,' admitted a pasty-looking youth of
nineteen.
'Oh, my dear! ... End of the last century, you mean,'
smirked Val.
One of the most amusing things about Mr. Valentine Redmond was his
imperturbable coolness. Though hardly two-and-twenty, he had none of the
tremors, the diffidences of youth. I have seen him talk to an archbishop or
a foreign potentate with the same ease with which he would tackle an
undergraduate or take a young lady down to supper. Not that you would ever
have caught Val Redmond wasting his acidulous sweetness on a young girl.
Women under thirty seldom went to his house.
One of his least pleasing characteristics was a tendency to flout and
pout. He was constantly having little quarrels with his intimate friends.
His intimate friendships lasted, on an average, exactly six weeks. In other
houses where they talk scandal it is usually about acquaintances, but in
Val's drawing-room you generally heard his bosom friends deprived of
their reputations. This is a trait which makes society feel uneasy, and to
it one may perhaps attribute the brief duration of Val's friendships.
Ours, for instance, though it was never perfervid, lasted but a brief two
months.
The Duchess of Birmingham brought him to our house. She was going to
have her portrait painted, and Val was brought along to help to decide on
her costume. He knew a great deal about clothes; his taste was charming,
his house as pretty as a house need be. Her Grace was a stout little person
from Philadelphia, who was at vast pains to acquire an English manner. Her
chief desire, as far as I could make out, was to be painted in a coronet.
But Mr. Redmond, with his head on one side and his eyes half shut, tabooed
the idea of a diadem. He was rather in favour of sables, of dark velvets,
of heavy brocades. Father, I remember, was furious when he had gone.
'Does the young puppy think he knows more about it than I do?
Confound his impudence--why, I have been painting portraits for twenty
years.'
And yet, after all, it was Valentine's costume which was chosen,
and the Duchess brought him again more than once to see the picture as it
progressed. Father always liked to have me in the studio when he was
painting, so that every time he appeared we made a little more of each
other's acquaintance. I think I
was rather rude to him than otherwise, but he was the sort of person who disliked gush--in women. Gushing was too much the prerogative of his 'boys,' who usually, by-the-bye, were heard addressing each other as 'my dear.'
Sitting on the oaken staircase of the studio, talking to Val while the
Duchess's portrait went on below, I learnt a number of surprising
things about London society. He told me of all the houses where a young man
might permit himself to be seen, where it would be to his advantage to do
so, and where it would be fatal, absolutely fatal, for him to appear.
'I had the imprudence to lunch with the Patterson-Tayleurs, those new
people in Prince's Gate; and though, of course, a lunch doesn't
count the same as a dinner, I assure you it was weeks before I heard the
last of it. A young man can't be too careful where he goes,' Val
confided to me one day with a rueful air. He had found me filling the bowls
and vases with roses, and had insisted on being allowed to help. It was one
of his talents, that of arranging flowers. He was sitting on the hall
table, swinging his feet, and holding his head on one side as he twitched
an amethyst-coloured orchid in front of the
light. 'There is the question of dancing, too. Ah, not that,' screamed Mr. Redmond in his rather shrill voice, as he plucked a huge poppy out of my hand; 'you can't possibly put that in blue and white; Nankin is only for roses! What was I saying? Oh yes, about balls. Isn't it absurd of people to expect one to dance everywhere? ... Some of us were at Mrs. Vandeleur's ball the other night--you know the woman I mean, with a quantity of drab daughters?--and she actually had the effrontery to seize me by the elbow and ask me why I wasn't dancing the polka? As if anyone ever did anything but sup at the Vandeleurs! and as if she didn't know perfectly well that one only dances at the houses where one dines! I resisted for a long time, and then she had the shocking taste to remind me that she had seen me leading the cotillon at the Duchess's with Lady Susan, when she knows that Lady Susan is one of the most amusing persons in London. She is the fin-de-siècle old maid.'
I shall never forget our first dinner at his house in Sloane Street. It
was the oddest party. There was something strange and unusual not only
about the guests, but the very
dishes and the flowers. The dining-room, painted and decorated like that of a Roman villa, contained nothing but the table and one or two giant palms in pots of old faïence. The tablecloth was nearly covered with a mass of pink rose-leaves, with here and there a spray of roses thrown carelessly on to this pink carpet. A huge lamp of Oriental workmanship, hung by gold chains, lighted up the mass; of rose colour, and there were none of the usual fripperies of a lady's table. But perhaps what struck one most on glancing round the room was the fact that all the men were boys, though they appeared prematurely old, and that all the ladies were elderly, though they, to be sure, looked unnaturally young.
'The glories of the past,' simpered the pale, clean-shaven
youth who had taken me in, surveying the ladies with unabashed effrontery.
'It reminds one of the ruins of the Acropolis, don't you
know.'
My neighbour got very confidential as the dinner progressed. He gazed at
me critically with tired eyes, under lids which drooped a little at the
corners.
'Do you know our host well? No? A
pity he's so shockingly malicious. Gives charming dinners--as far as the people go--but I don't think much of his cook, do you? Oh no, I've only known him a fortnight; he insisted on being introduced to me at the Vandeleurs' ball, and I thought, as he is a great friend of one of my dearest friends--Tommy Singleton, you know--that he would be sure to be nice.... And I really do think he's charming. He would take no denial; I've dined here already three times.... We go everywhere together. Do you see that weird old person opposite? She says such quite too deliciously amusing things; she is a great friend of the Prince of Wales's. Tommy Singleton seems in great form to-night. He is so very charming! I must introduce you to him, though I'm afraid, my dear Miss Wynman, that you won't get on very well. Tommy is so dreadfully frightened of débutantes. Don't you think dear Lady Rougemont's new toupée is quite delicious? I do. But then I adore the meretricious and the artificial. That is Miss Van Hoyt, the American heiress; she always wears that miniature of an old gentleman with a hook nose and powdered hair. She says it's her grandfather;
but Tommy Singleton declares--and he had it from the Duchess--that Miss Van Hoyt's grandfather kept a small cheesemonger's shop in Ninth Avenue. How quite too weird Lady Susan looks; but then she always has her gowns made from remnants bought at the summer sales. She must have said something dreadfully improper to Val, he is laughing so; look, he has got quite pink! I wonder what it is? I shall ask her directly; she loves to have the whole table listen to her stories--though really her stories are d'un raide! Lady Susan, you know, is not afraid of le mot qui choque.'
And, of a truth, the ladies at Mr. Redmond's dinner-table denied
themselves nothing in the way of speech. Nor, when the cigarettes were
handed round, did they show the usual feminine reluctance to light up;
though this may have been a protest on their part against the effeminacy of
the age, for it was a remarkable fact at Mr. Valentine Redmond's
parties that, though the elderly ladies invariably smoked, none of the
young gentlemen indulged in nicotine.
When the men rejoined us in the drawing-room, I found myself, to my
surprise, the
centre of a small group of attentive youths. One sat on a footstool at my feet, another hung over the back of the sofa, while a third reclined among the cushions at my elbow. And they all asked if they might come and call. Afterwards I heard that Mr. Redmond had passed the word that I was 'charming,' a dictum which they always accepted without questioning. Val and his friends invariably worshipped in a little crowd.
After that night Mr. Valentine Redmond was pleased to indulge in one of
his wild enthusiasms. He brought all his boys to see me, one by one, and
insisted that they should admire me as much as he did; which was as
tiresome for them, poor things, as for me. My photograph, framed in gold
and turquoises, was, for exactly five weeks, a conspicuous object on his
drawing-room table; after which, for a fortnight, it stood on a cupboard in
a dark corner, and finally, I hear, disappeared altogether--to the
limbo where the rest of his departed 'enthusiasms' languish.
But I am anticipating the catastrophe. For six weeks, at least, Val and I
saw a good deal of each other. At one of our big parties Mr. Redmond and
some of
his young friends made quite a little sensation when they appeared. They were all clean-shaven, and all had tired eyes, exaggerated buttonholes, and shoes of phenomenal luminosity.
'Gracious heavens!' whispered Christina, when she saw them
all file in--they always went about in cabfuls--'What are
they? Where did you find them? And what's to be done with them now
they're here?' But Valentine Redmond and his friends never
wanted amusing. They all had a passion for being introduced to other young
men of their own age, and, failing that, they gathered together in corners
and smirked over their own little jokes.
The chief amusement of these boys, I soon found out, was to go to
music-halls. They spoke of Miss Bessie Bellwood with bated breath; and
would hear of no other comedians than Mr. Arthur Roberts and Mr. Albert
Chevalier. They had a positive infatuation for acrobats, for those stout,
bespangled gentlemen who tie themselves into knots and balance themselves
on each other's heads, with a fixed smile, to the accompaniment of a
spirited waltz
tune. It was Val Redmond's delight to get two or three smart women to dinner, with a corresponding number of boys, and then to take the party on to the Empire or to the Pavilion.
'Why do you like tumblers and topical songs so much?' I
asked Val one day, when I had refused, for the fourth time, a pleading
invitation to make one of a party to the Tivoli. He shrugged his shoulders
and looked rather annoyed.
'Culture is such a bore,' he said;
'on a besoin de s'encanailler
quelquefois.'
This London idyl lasted, I think, nearly two months, and then, as London
idyls will, it came to a painless death. Its end was hastened by gossips,
and it was killed with a mot.
'Val Redmond's ambition was to start a
salon in Sloane Street, but he has only
succeeded, so far, in running a restaurant,' Christina had said on
one of her unamiable days.
Someone, of course, told Val.
The rupture left no sense of loss. Though good-looking, clever, and
amusing, Val Redmond's personality somehow 'left one
cold.' It was an essentially thin nature. Had I ever had occasion to
appeal to his help, his
sympathy, I fancy I should have had a charming, gushing little note to say that he was going out of town. One had an uneasy feeling that his devotion was only meant for dinner-parties; his little compliments were, like his bonbons, the accompaniments of the box he offered you at the play.
Once a year or so we still go and dine with Val. The swinging lamp, the
spreading palms, the wealth of hot-house flowers are always there, but it
is the rarest thing to find the same face. Our host renews his friends as
often as the bouquets in his buttonhole.
Dr. Styles was a stoutish person of thirty-two, with nondescript
features and a slow, portentous manner, along with a large and increasing
practice in the suburb of Northaw, where his medical skill was in constant
request among the spinsters and widows of that
some-
what damp and chilly neighbourhood. So highly esteemed were his services in the sick-room that these ladies would send for him at all hours of the day or night, until the good doctor, in self-defence, took to sending his red-haired assistant to some of his more flagrantly imaginary invalids.
Daisy Drysdale's husband was a manufacturer in Mudchester, and,
like other manufacturers, he lived as far away from the factory chimneys of
that thriving city as possible. So his brand-new red-brick mansion lay on
the other side of the suburb of Northaw, and the society of Northaw
supplied nearly all Mrs. Drysdale's intellectual recreation. Poor
Daisy! how she missed London! And what, as she plaintively asked, was the
use of her giving little dinners, seeing the component elements of which
her parties were to be henceforward composed? Still, she was not to be
baffled, and Mrs. Drysdale constantly entertained. She kept open house,
too, and was delighted to see people drop in of an evening. The very night
I arrived, by some chance, Dr. Styles came in about nine o'clock.
They were playing whist at one end of
the long drawing-room, and I was set down to entertain the doctor at the other.
I shall not easily forget that night. Accustomed to the manifestly
insincere gushings of London young men, I was amused at the naïve
manner in which this country Æsculapius comported himself. For a long
time we talked of the last exhibition at Burlington House, for he
remembered father's pictures, and was much impressed, apparently, by
the fact that he was talking to an Academician's daughter. The
provinces are still impressed by the Royal Academy.
They played more than one rubber of whist that night, but Dr. Styles
remained until the end. Before he left he had offered to lend me a horse,
proposed that he should drive me to a ruin ten miles off, and expressed a
wish that I should know his three sisters.
The drive to the ruin had assumed the proportions of a picnic before
three days were over. Life, as someone has justly observed, would be
tolerable if it were not for its pleasures, and possibly our English
summers would be less dreary to look back upon were it not for the
inevitable picnic.
The day declared itself grey and chilly, with watery-looking clouds
hanging despondingly overhead; but as it was not actually raining, we of
course felt obliged to start. The doctor drove Mrs. Drysdale and me, and,
as he had to stop and see several patients on his way out of Northaw, we
were three-quarters of an hour late when we arrived on the festive scene.
We found our friends reclining on rugs and cushions in a damp field, where
there was an unmistakable odour of manure; we found, also, that they were
already more than half through the meal; for, as they justly observed, the
cold had made them uncommonly hungry, though the quantity of well-picked
bones and empty bottles sufficiently proclaimed the fact. But the mention
of empty bottles suggests an air of hilarity which did not belong to this
particular feast. A number of total abstainers were of the party, and these
had brought their own supply of perry, lemonade, and mineral waters, and
now sat apart round one table-cloth, surveying, with somewhat un-sheeplike
glances, the goats who were imbibing shandy-gaff and claret. This attitude
on the part of non-
alcoholic Northaw not being conducive to sociability, the party, as a whole, cannot be said to have been, as the French say, of 'a mad gaiety.' The doctor did his best, but he had not the light social touch. If he offered you the salad, it was with a portentous air; or did he spread you a cushion, he never dropped his professional manner.
Several untoward accidents marred what was left of the day. A young lady
had hysterics at the back of the ruin, and the doctor, who was fetched just
when he was showing me the view from the topmost turret, muttered something
distinctly ungallant about his prospective patient as he hurried off. A
drizzle began just as the tea was laid, and the rain fell in dismal earnest
as we drove home to Northaw.
The next time I saw our friend Dr. Styles my head was tied up in a
flannel shawl, and my throat was so swollen that I could hardly speak. The
doctor had been called in professionally. The Northaw picnic had been too
much for a Londoner uninured to the climate, and I was down with a
malignant sore throat.
The doctor came evely day, and once he
came twice, to work a patent inhaler, and paint my throat with some mysterious compound. He constantly changed the treatment; it was as if he never could do enough. He even used to bring me flowers--and who ever heard of a doctor taking his patient flowers? Daisy was convulsed with amusement. She said that, when she was ill, she sometimes used to have to send for Dr. Styles two or three times before he appeared, he was so busy.
At the end of a week I was better, and in ten days I was quite well. I
really felt very grateful, for I knew that the doctor had saved me by his
constant care from a dangerous illness. I wonder if he took my gratitude
for--something else? Anyway, as I told Christina when she scolded me
for the whole affair, it was not my fault.
The thing came quickly to a crisis. We were all invited to spend an
evening at the doctor's house. In the North they have a mysterious
meal called 'high tea,' which is apparently a source of no
little comfort and even of self-righteousness. It enables the habitual
partakers thereof to allude witheringly to the late dinner indulged in by
inhabitants of
the South, and so, if you are invited out in Northaw, be sure you will be regaled on tea and cold chicken (fearful mixture!), on hot cakes, jam, marmalade, and currant buns. To this evening meal, then, we were bidden by Dr. Styles.
He lived alone with his sisters, who were curiously like him. They were
all stoutish, with nondescript features, and had solemn and somewhat stolid
manners. To see all four of them together inclined one to indecent mirth.
It was impossible to be more worthy, more dull, and more
self-satisfied.
They sat in a circle in the long drawing-room on rather uncomfortable
chairs. All three of the Misses Styles took great interest in church
matters, or at least in the curate, who was unmarried, and whom they
consulted very often on the subject of soup tickets and flannel petticoats.
The curate, and a boy of about nineteen years of age, with a shrill voice,
were the other men of the party. Miss Styles (the eldest of the three
Misses Styles) was a capital housekeeper; everything went like clockwork in
the doctor's roomy house. The early dinner was served to a minute. Two
o'clock was the hour. If the doctor were out, the meal proceeded with unfailing punctuality, a slice of mutton being kept hot in the oven for the master of the house. On the long, bare lavender-coloured walls of the drawing-room hung several water-colours by Miss Louisa; indeed, the Misses Styles were considered to have a pretty taste for art. They painted everything within reach with sprawling red roses or startling white daisies, the doctor being of opinion that his sisters' artistic talent was of the first order. Miss Ada, too, was musical, and sang songs by Pinsuti and Milton Wellings. The doctor liked Miss Ada's vocal efforts. Miss Emily was literary; at least, she assiduously read Miss Edna Lyall and Mr. Rider Haggard, and of these authors we discoursed solemnly until 'tea' was announced.
The table groaned with good things: with buttered toast, with salad,
with vague dishes covered with custard, with ham, with quivering
blanc-mange. The curate, it transpired, had a phenomenal appetite, though
he coughed and expostulated when helped to a third serve of pressed beef.
Both he and the shrill-voiced
boy had been among the abstaining sheep at our picnic; this evening meal, therefore, washed down by tea and coffee, had obviously no terrors for them. The conversation was not of the kind that dazzles. There were frequent pauses, during which Miss Ada made several bald statements about a forthcoming village concert, and the doctor, wishing to show his knowledge of the town, solemnly inquired if I had seen Mr. Irving in Henry VIII.?
The air was full of ominous portents. The doctor's manner, when he
invited me for the second time to partake of cold chicken, or pressed upon
me, with Northern hospitality, the currant cake, was full of a certain
protecting pride, while a humbly conquering expression was in his eyes when
they rested upon me. It was with 'intention'--as the
French say--that he showed me the photograph album, full of aunts and
cousins, after tea. The good doctor looked quite sentimental when, later
on, Miss Ada warbled a romance with a waltz accompaniment, entitled
'The Love that will Never Fade.' I began to feel restless. More
than once did I cross the room, engage either of the Misses Styles in
feverish
con-
versation--I always ended by finding the doctor at my elbow. At last I resigned myself to my fate, and sat down to talk to him. I imagined that the sanitary state of the suburb of Northaw would be a safe subject, and one unlikely to lead to a declaration of a tender nature, but inll this, it appeared, I was mistaken. We got on to the subject of fevers, and, to convince me on a certain point, the doctor suggested a reference to one of the medical books in his surgery. Once inside the little room, which lay just across the passage, Dr. Styles shut the door and advanced towards me with that particular expression which is so intolerable in a man one doesn't care for.
I put on my most indifferent manner, and inspected with much interest
the rows of medical books in their glass case.
'So kind of you,' I said hurriedly, to fill up the dreadful
pause, 'to take so much trouble Most doctors only
laugh at you if one wants to know any real fact--about your dreadful
trade,' I added with flippancy, seeing that the man was not listening
to a word I was saying, but was gazing at me as an amiable snake might be
said to regard a sparrow.
'Trouble!' he said at last. 'How can anything be a
trouble that is done for you? I wish you would let me tell you how much
I--how much I--'
A sharp rap at the door interrupted this speech. A servant came in.
'Please, sir, Mr. Brown is very bad, and Mrs. Brown says, will you
come at once, and bring some of the drops, and she hopes you won't be
long.'
'A three-mile drive!' said Dr. Styles with a sigh,
'and I shall not see you again to-night.' He took my hand and
held it fast. 'I will bring the book to-morrow morning. Shall I have
a chance of seeing you alone? Try to be alone when I come,' and,
wrenching my hand violently, the doctor disappeared.
'Daisy,' I said hurriedly in the carriage going home,
'I'm sorry to say, dear, I shall have to go home by the 10.15
to-morrow. I--I had a telegram just before we came out.'
'You had a fiddlestick! What nonsense, Peggy! Why, you came to
stay a month, and you've hardly been twelve days.'
'Twelve days? Good heavens! Why, how has he--?'
'Oh, it's that, is it? And so, you don't like him? Well,
I think you're silly. You might do much worse. How much better to
settle down with someone like that than with one of your flipperty London
young men. He's sensible, clever, a good fellow, well off, and very
fond of you--'
'The 10.15, please, Daisy.'
And, sure enough, by the 10.15 I went. As the Yorkshire fields flew
behind me on my rapid journey back to London, the whole thing seemed like
some nightmare from which I had just awoke. Great heavens! From what had I
not escaped? A lifetime of high tea, suburban gossip, and provincial
self-sufficiency, of rose-bedecked door-panels, the novels of Mr. Rider
Haggard, and 'The Love that will Never Fade.'
I am very fond of Mrs. Drysdale, but it will be a long time before I
again trust myself to the seductions of that suburb of Mudchester.
Quite suddenly he had become the fashion. Some great lady in
London--I forget who--had heard Claud Carson recite one of his
own love songs at a concert got up for a charity, and she had invited him
to her house, where he had met other women of fashion, and between
themselves, in their little set, they had determined to make him the mode.
It was at one of the Duchess of Birmingham's nicest parties--one
of her small musical evenings--that we first saw him.
I had been away from town a month or two, and was out of touch with
London things, so that when someone said excitedly to me in the
supper-room, 'Oh, conime upstairs; Claud Carson is going to
recite!' and I saw all the women
trailing out of the room at once, I turned to the nearest young man to ask what it all meant.
'Oh, some cad with long hair, who rolls his eyes about, and
recites erotic poems; meet him at every blessed place you go to,' was
the answer, as my informant helped himself to plovers' eggs and
reached for a fresh bottle of champagne. Upstairs, however, in the
music-room, there was a flutter of excitement. A Royal Duchess was present:
an event, coupled with the fact that this new artist was going to perform,
favouring that kind of electric buzz in the air which is so precious to the
ears of an anxious hostess. Round the grand piano was a line of pretty
women, all with their eyes turned towards the seated figure at the
music-stool. There was perfect silence as Mr. Claud Carson rippled a few
chords over the keys.
I peeped over the shoulders of two or three people in front of me, and
saw a white face framed in long blonde hair, which fell in one straight
lock across the forehead. The eyes, which were fixed on the cornice of the
ceiling, were dark grey in colour, and full of what young ladies call
'soul.' The nose was thin and straight,
the lips full and beautifully curved, the jaw rather square and pathetically thin. It was a face out of a Burne-Jones picture.
Then the long white hands moved rhythmically over the piano, and Claud
Carson, sweeping an ineffably weary glance along the line of pretty faces
bent towards him, finally fixed his gaze on the Royal Duchess, and began to
recite, speaking his words in a rather monotonous tone, to an accompaniment
of ripples and chords.
'Ah, he's going to do that charming thing from his
"Roses of Passion," the book which he is just going to
publish,' somebody whispered excitedly. 'I like him best when
he recites his own poems.'
First Mr. Claud Carson told us how he had met a young person in the
twilight's mellow time, and how the daisies had kissed her feet, but
how she, swerving beneath his glances, had flitted through the net-work
fine, of buds which blow, in hawthorn's glow; but eventually it
appeared the lady had not proved so coy, for in the second verse Mr. Carson
very justly remarked:
But if you linger in that place
Beneath the hawthorns'
interlace,
And I may gaze upon your face,
Shall love forgo
sweet passion's flow?
The stars alone look down on
high,
The winds alone repeat your sigh,
No eyes our lonely
tryst
descry:
They little know, they little know.
Fans waved in time to the quaint rhythm, necks were craned forward, eyes
drooped and glistened, there were pensive smiles on curved lips. It was not
very good, but there was something magnetic about the strange performance.
Claud Carson effectually 'filled the stage.' While he was
reciting it was impossible to look in any other direction.
And if the second twilight break,
Faint bird-notes sweet the
morning make,
And wond'rihg world now reawake
And life
reflow, with love and woe;
The new day finds us parted,
sweet,
And new worlds open at our feet,
Once strange--as
strangers shall we meet?
We little know, we little
know.
He finished in a whisper which just filtered through his clenched
teeth.
An elderly gentleman coughed severely, and a couple of young ones, with
faces as
unemotional as their glistening shirt-fronts, exchanged a swift expressive glance. The Royal Duchess beamed approval, and signified that the reciter should be presented to her. The whole performance was a delightful interlude in the decorous solemnity of her exalted existence. I was the only woman in the room who laughed.
'I suppose it's an acquired taste, like caviare or
absinthe,' I said to a smart woman near me; 'but one has got to
get accustomed to it. Why does he play the piano all the time if he's
going to recite?'
The smart lady surveyed me with a withering glance.
'It's the most charming thing in London,' she said;
'Claud Carson is a delightful person.'
All heads were turned in the direction of the young poet as he stood
talking to the Royal Duchess, his beautiful eyes fixed on her face, while
occasionally, with a pretty, fatigued movement, he raised a white, graceful
hand and pushed back the lock of blonde hair from his forehead. Before the
short conversation was over, she had invited him to come and see her.
'It's stupid, hardly decent, and almost
incomprehensible,' said Christina, as we drove home; 'so I shouldn't wonder if he became the rage this season.'
And sure enough he did. One found him everywhere one went, and I had
grown quite accustomed to the thrilling tones of his languorous voice, the
enigmatic look in his deep-set eyes, when one night he asked to be
introduced to me.
'Everywhere,' said Mr. Carson, as he dropped into a chair at
my side, 'everywhere I see your face.... But until to-night I did not
know who you were,' he added softly.
His tone, his manner annoyed me.
'Perhaps you didn't ask!' I suggested, though an
instant later I was sorry that I should have allowed myself to be flippant
with a strange young man of whom I did not altogether approve.
And then he did something which showed that he was clever. He gazed at
me in perfect silence for several minutes, until the memory of my flippant
words had quite died away.
'Come,' he said at last in his thrilling tones, 'let
me give you some strawberries.'
I took his arm and went. We had a
charming time that night. Claud Carson was less absurd than he looked. Under his little affectations there was a boyish, frank personality which was really attractive; and when he could forget the fact that all the women in the room were staring at him, and remember that he was not expected to keep up the character of a modern Minnesänger while he helped you to quails and plovers' eggs, he was a nice, simple boy. Afterwards, by-the-bye, I heard that he was at least eight-and-twenty; but he was one of those fair, clean-shaven individuals who never look as if they had emerged from their teens.
'I want to come and see you,' said Claud Carson that night,
holding my hand as we stood under the portico waiting for the carriage;
'when may I come?'
'We are at home on Sundays at five.'
'Not then, not in a crowd of people,' he pleaded. 'I
want to see you--alone.'
'Oh, in that case,' I answered, laughing, 'don't
come on a Sunday. Come--say on Wednesday. And then you will see
Christina.'
But Christina, when he finally appeared, found him impossible. She said
that his hands
were too white, and that the shape of his collar was revolting. She did not like his poems; generally, she did not understand what they meant, and when she did, she said she wished she hadn't.
Claud Carson began to come a good deal. He was always dropping in at
tea-time, and he never failed to look reproachful if he found me pouring
out tea for Mr. Mandell, Val Redmond, or Tony Lambert. He would sit in a
low chair, leaning back, and regarding me with half-closed eyes--a
habit which Christina declared was insufferable. Indeed, she generally
remembered she had letters to write when Mr. Carson called.
'I have come to offer you what I prize most in the world,'
he said one day when we were alone.
'But I never take things--anything but flowers, I
mean--from people,' I objected, hastily.
'Ah, but you will--you must--accept this. I dedicate to
you my "Roses of Passion," the firstborn of my brain. Dear
child, they are yours.' He handed me a bit of paper, on which was
written:--
'To M.
W.
These, my first trembling chords on the instrumenit of Life, I dedicate
to you. Perfect soul, framed in your strange, subtly-sweet beauty, I
worship you from without, with never a thought of earthly guerdon. Fools
only wish to pluck the star from the heavens, the lily from its stem. I
leave my star in the blye vault, my lily in its garden.
'London, February, 189--
'Oh,' I said, 'how nice! Only, you mustn't put
"To M. W."; you had better put three stars. I shall know who
you mean.'
We sat and talked for a long time in the twilight. It was the end of
February, and the late afternoon was tinged with the pale, wondering light
of an early English spring. The trees outside were swelling with purple
buds, and through the black branches there was the gleam of a tender, rosy
sunset. It was the time of confidences, and the kind of day one says all
sorts of things one doesn't mean, in a soft, regretful voice, just
because they sound well and seem to fit into the emotional hour.
Claud Carson knelt on the window-seat, his
blonde head turned to pale gold against the window-pane.
'You have helped me more than any woman I have ever known,'
he said at last, with a sigh.
'Have I?' I asked, touched, flattered, and pleased. I was at
an age when a girl likes to be called a 'woman.'
'I'm sure I don't know how! What have I ever done for
you?'
He gazed at me for a few seconds, and then turned abruptly away.
'You have made my life happier,' he said. In another instant
he had pressed my hand, and was gone.
Christina's dry tones called me back to mundane things.
'And so you have had that impossible young man here for
hours,' said my sister, bursting into the room with all the
matter-of-fact and common-sense which an afternoon out of doors brings with
it. 'May I ask if you intend to make a fool of him, too?'
'To make a fool of him! No, I don't think I shall ever be
able to do that.'
And my words, to be sure, came true.
A little while after, we were driving one
afternoon towards Hammersmith, when suddenly the coachman pulled up. A huge dray had got across the road, and for a few moments we were obliged to wait while a small crowd urged the horses this way and that. We had stopped in a street of small stucco houses, whose weedy front gardens were suggestive of anything but rural delights. And then, as we waited, a thin, undersized child of seven ran out of one of the open hall-doors--a door which revealed a vision of a perambulator, a shabby oilcloth, and a framed oleograph--and hung staring over the green-painted rails.
''Ow dare you? Come in directly, Ermyntrude,' said a
querulous voice; and for an instant I caught a glimpse of a rather
good-looking young woman in a cheap tailor-made gown. 'I shall tell
your father. You are a most disobedient child!' A moment later a
young man strode down the gravelled path, seized the undersized child in
his arms, kissed her, and carried her indoors. Just as he disappeared in
the doorway our eyes met. The young man was Claud Carson.
'So he is married--your modern Minnesänger,' said
Christina drily, holding her chin
up and looking straight in front of her as we drove on.
'Apparently,' I said, shrugging my shoulders and gazing at
the coachman's back. I was not to be outdone in imperturbability by
Christina.
'He has married the landlady's daughter--poets generally
do. But it was considerate of him,' she continued, with a twinkle in
the corner of her eye, "to leave his star in the blue vault, his lily
in its garden," seeing that he has already got one lily and a
promising bud or two in Khartoum Gardens, Hammersmith.'
And then we both fell back on the cushions and gave way to
uncontrollable giggles. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks.
'When will you learn sense?' sighed
Christina.
He was a charming host. All the guests at Mr. Clancy's parties
seemed on easy terms The men called each other by their
Christian names; the ladies had quaint little nicknames for their friends.
An atmosphere of intimate chat hung about the rooms. The women spoke in
cooing tones, and had interminable confidences to make, while the men
laughed softly
as they leant forward to listen with an amused air in the veiled lamplight. It was distinctly a house where one enjoyed oneself. Julian Clancy would ask a dozen people--most of them well known--and you would find them, when you arrived, chatting with soft, intimate voices in obscure corners, or loitering, as they whispered the latest malicious story, in the draped doorways. Not that Julian Clancy himself ever listened to malicious stories. Though he wrote novels of modern society, lived all the year round in London, and was now over forty years of age, it was astonishing how guileless, how optimistic, he remained. His vague face and worn smile suggested only the most indefinite emotions, and yet the warmth of his language was extraordinary. Everyone he knew was 'a dear' or 'a dear person,' while the more favoured ones were 'so perfectly good and sweet.' Mr. Clancy would not listen to a word against anyone. How could people be so horrid as to say that his dear Lady Rougemont's beautiful red hair was dyed, or that his charming Charlie Deuceace was not the most exemplary of husbands? People were so unkind! Well off and well connected, he mixed in the
best, as well as the rapidest, sets in London, but what he really worshipped was the 'celebrity.' It is an error to suppose that all the Leo Hunters are of the feminine sex. Julian Clancy always had the last celebrity--and, failing that, the last notoriety--at his parties in St. John's Wood.
He adored St. John's Wood. Celebrated artists, actors, dramatists
were all to be found within a stone's throw of his door; he could run
in and out of famous studios, and catch distinguished actors for his little
suppers on their way home from the theatres. He tolerated a countess (if
she happened to be amusing), but a new dancing girl set him raving. He used
to ask great ladies to meet the most extraordinary people, and somehow or
other they always came. His Sunday dinners--of eight--were most
amusing. One never knew if one would sit next to a Guardsman, a burlesque
actor, or the representative of a foreign Power. He knew everybody, and
everybody wanted to know him. The Honourable Julian Clancy, second son of
Lord Basingstoke, had a position in society which is not often the lot of
younger sons. But then, to be sure, his brother had no children,
and was already separated from his wife. In all human probability Julian would one day succeed to the earldom. And yet he, for his part, was chiefly preoccupied with literary fame. Every other year or so he published, at his own expense, a rather second-rate novel, which, however, had one merit. It was usually in one volume, with fat print and wide margins, so that when he presented it to his friends, with charming little enthusiastic phrases written on the first page, they were able to get a good idea what it was about without being at the pains to read it. About the time his book appeared, he usually gave one of his pleasantest parties, where one saw him with one arm round the neck of some young man who wrote reviews for the penny papers.
In former days, when he was younger and less gushing, Mr. Julian Clancy
had been in the diplomatic service, and had wandered in many lands. He
never wandered now. As a matter of fact, he never left London. Every year,
when other people were making their autumn plans, he would point to his
garden, with its pear-trees and hollyhocks, its plashing fountain and
cooing doves, and ask you plain
tively why he should leave it? September, January, or June he would stroll down St. James's Street to his club at five o'clock. Every year, as soon as August came, a paragraph went the round of the gossipy papers chronicling the fact that Mr. Julian Clancy never left town. People thought it so original and charming; he had quite a little notoriety on that account alone. But London, to be sure, was a passion with him. The pavement of Piccadilly was to him what the boulevard is to the Parisian. He was miserable five miles from Bond Street, and I have known him to rave about the exquisite effects one saw in a London fog. Julian Clancy made a cult of the metropolis.
His house--in springtime buried in a white cloud of pear-blossom,
in summer shady with spreading chestnut-trees and limes--was one of
the prettiest things in town. A low, two-storied cottage, with queer-shaped
rooms built out at odd angles, it was draped, arranged, and furnished with
an artist's hand. His music-room, with its polished floor and Oriental
walls, contained nothing but a grand piano, a huge spreading palm, and a
low, downy divan running round the sides; but through a Cairene
archway you stept into a drawing-room crowded with nick-nacks, hung with old brocade, and as dainty as the boudoir of some eighteenth-century beauty. In the dining-room the prim, thin Chippendale furniture was ranged against a pale-coloured wall, while the round table, with its fine damask and Georgian silver, and the soft lamplight illumining a great bowl of flowers, was somehow suggestive of brilliant talk and dainty fare. But Mr. Clancy was always modest about his possessions. 'It's so sweet of you to like my things,' he would say deprecatingly to some fashionable lady who was going round his rooms sniffing up ideas. 'I never care for anything I have. It's so good of you to like my poor little cottage.'
He came very often to our Sunday evening parties, when, about twelve
o'clock, one saw his fatigued, expressionless features and his superb
shirt-front appear in the studio doorway. He was one of the men,
by-the-bye, who look their best at night, the sharp black and white of
man's evening dress giving him a distinction, an elegance, which he
somewhat lacked. At first I did not know why he came so often.
Father--to whom he regularly offered up some
of his choicest phrases--never liked him, and took no particular pains to conceal the fact. To mother all young men--especially in the evening--are alike. She looks upon them as necessary evils at our parties, but makes few distinctions between them. Christina was away that season, so there remained only myself. As the years had passed on I had had experience enough to know that a man who is heir-presumptive to an English earldom is not likely to preoccupy himself with a middle-class damsel of modest dowry. What brought him, then, so often to our house? Time, as usual, revealed the secret, and in this wise.
July, with its damp garden parties, was upon us. Mr. Julian
Clancy's annual outdoor fête was one of the events of the late
summer. He arranged the thing charmingly, and people intrigued for cards to
what was sure to be an amusing party. This year it was rumoured he was to
have the whole of the Frivolity chorus girls, attired as milkmaids, to
dance skirt dances on his velvety lawn. So everybody wanted to go.
For some time beforehand Mr. Clancy was
indefatigable in his calls at our house. He talked, as much as he ever talked about anything of his own--for he was only enthusiastic about other people and their parties, which were always 'perfectly charming' or 'too lovely'--of his forthcoming entertainment.
'I do so hope you'll come,' he said.
'I want you all to come. It would be so sweet and good
of you all to come to my little party.'
'Oh, we don't go about in droves,' I said, laughing.
'Won't one or two of the family be enough?'
'Of course I only insist upon you,' said Julian, with a
shade of his old diplomatic manner; 'but I should be so proud
if--your father would come.'
A light flashed over me. This, then, was a possible explanation of Mr.
Julian Clancy's devotion. He was hunting a celebrity--he wanted
my father! How dense I had been, to be sure. Father was not only a famous
and successful Royal Academician, but he was one of the most amusing people
in town.
The day of the garden party I was all diplomacy and white muslin. Early
in the afternoon I captured my distinguished parent
and insisted on his accompanying me to St. John's Wood. I was not going to appear without him, as a second-rate substitute for a celebrity.
The sleepy suburban road was alive with carriages and cabs as we drove
up, and at every turn you nodded to some well-known face. The clean-shaven
profile and heliotrope necktie of Duncan Clive, the actor, were seen in a
victoria side by side with Lady Susan's extraordinary hat (her
ladyship had long ago given up chaperons as superfluous); Val Redmond,
Tommy Singleton, and the pale-faced boy foamed out of a hansom, all blue
buttonholes and light gloves; the Duchess of Birmingham was driving up in
the ducal chariot, and had brought Miss Van Hoyt; there was no end to the
people one knew. Inside the house it was dark and hot, and in the Oriental
music-room you could hardly stand, for a famous prima donna was lamenting,
in a piercing soprano voice, and an indifferent Italian accent, the absence
of her beloved, while a small, red-haired cavalry major told a funny story
in a high, penetrating voice, until several people said 'Hush!'
and turned round and frowned.
In the dining-room one saw a vista of backs pushing and struggling over a buffet, and there was an acrid odour of coffee and strawberries as you passed the open door to reach the garden.
Outside, the scene was pretty enough. In the green garden the pink, and
mauve, and white dresses of the women made clear patches on the verdure,
and smiling, fatigued faces greeted each other from under fantastic hats. A
Viennese band played beneath a huge cedar; the Frivolity girls, with their
crinkled white frocks and painted cheeks--looking pinker than ever
under their starched sun-bonnets--stood huddled together in the
distance, and nudged each other as they recognised several smart young men,
who, with imperturbable faces, were handing water-ices to the season's
débutantes.
Presently the band struck up a catchy air, and the girls, forming into a
line against a background of ivy, flipped their loose skirts and executed a
series of swaying movements with fixed, mechanical smiles. The
youngest--a thing of seven, with thin, pointed knees--had the
most surprisingly wooden smile of all;
she was like a miniature, but exaggerated, copy of the showy girls who towered above her. There was a great deal of applause when they had done, and only the smart young men appeared to be but vaguely interested in the performance.
Our host, as usual, was charming, but one felt that something
distracting was in the air. One saw it in Mr. Julian Clancy's
preoccupied face as he gushed a little over us both, making a civil effort
when we entered. Something important was going on inside the house, from
the glances which our host kept turning towards the open drawing-room
windows. What could it be?
We were not long left in doubt. 'Oh, have you heard?' cried
Val Redmond, detaining us with a delighted giggle. 'Nankowsky, the
Russian who says he has been to the North Pole, is in there in the
drawing-room. He is such a delightful person. They say he is a leper, but I
don't believe that, though I dare say you can catch it from the
Esquimaux. If I were you I should only look at him through the window, in
case it is true, you know. He certainly is a very odd
colour.'
This, then, was the reason of Mr. Clancy's tepid enthusiasm over
father's appearance. Nankowsky, the famous Nankowsky, was a very great
celebrity--the newest of the season--and he was now holding an
informal levée in the drawing-room, where people were being
introduced to him in shoals. Mr. Julian Clancy, it was obvious, had
forgotten his ardour for my father in the triumph of securing a lion with a
more penetrating roar.
'Dear,' I said twenty minutes later, when we had wandered
round the garden, shaking hands right and left, 'I'm afraid this
sort of thing bores you. Let's go home and have tea together in the
studio--just you and I.'
We looked for our host, but he was not visible. As we crossed the hall,
however, we saw his back for an instant through the open drawing-room door.
He was quite absorbed, and did not hear us going out. Mr. Julian Clancy was
bending over the new celebrity, and we could hear him saying, in his slow,
well-bred tones:
'It was so good and lovely of you to
come!'
Inside, up the wide staircase, with its crimson carpets and its banks of
flowers and plants, all London was elbowing its way to the crowded
galleries. People who had intrigued successfully for a ticket wore a
triumphant, satisfied smile; the critics were preparing their most stolid,
yet important air; women journalists felt for their pencils and note-books,
eagerly demanding the names of over-dressed ladies; and the
painters--the Royal Academicians and
the few famous 'outsiders' who are invited to the private view, collected in little knots round some much-discussed canvas, or, plucking each other by the sleeve, hurried through the rooms in search of some striking picture by an unknown brush.
But Mr. Morris hurried neither here nor there, for he was a person of
importance. He stood in the middle of the big room, casting cursory glances
at the pictures on the walls, and shaking hands with a small procession of
people who passed incessantly in front of him; with fashionable ladies, who
stopped to give him several fingers, and then passed on with a well-turned
phrase and a non-committing smile; with journalists, judges, actors, and
cabinet ministers. We came upon him suddenly, father and I, and when I had
been introduced, he seemed all at once to have a great deal to say....
Mr. Albert Morris was about fifty years old, and had a humorous eye. He
was rather fat and rather red, and I think his hair and moustache were very
carefully dyed. He was absurdly rich. One of the big weekly papers belonged
to him, and he owned a good many 9*9*
shares in the opera. Mr. Morris also bought pictures, and was invited nearly every year to the Royal Academy banquet. Everything he touched turned to gold; he had the true instinct of his race for money. Albert Morris made fabulous sums out of the most unlikely things, and they say that he was once seen driving through the City in a four-wheel cab piled to the ceiling with Argentine bonds. He never went farther away from town than Brighton, in order to be always within an hour of the Stock Exchange. But with all his money and his influence he was the simplest of men, and had only two strongly developed tastes--a liking for a good story and a pretty woman. His house in Piccadilly was, it is true, a little over-gorgeous; but then he had left the furnishing and decorating to a well-known firm, who had somewhat overdone the Louis XVI. period. Nobody, however, including the owner, seemed to think there were too many carved gilt legs and florid brocades, and in the celebrated white dining-room, with its panels by Chaplin, Mr. Albert Morris used to give little suppers to Royalty.
He was a self-made man, and he believed
in money. He had bought everything: his position, his influence, his friends, his newspaper, his house, his pictures, his books and curios, the love of women, and the devotion of his servants. There was only one thing he dreaded, and that was a thing from which his millions could not save him. He was horribly afraid of death. Possible accidents or illnesses were a constant anxiety to Mr. Morris: he was childishly frightened of infectious diseases, he never went to bed without a ladder outside his window in case of fire, and he never sat behind--or on--a strange horse. If his little finger ached, or he caught a cold in the head, he consulted the greatest physicians in London, and he always carried a tiny golden flask containing brandy, for someone had once told him he had a weak heart. Poor Mr. Morris, quaking in the midst of his millions! They found him one morning--but I am anticipating.
Though of thoroughly Jewish origin, it was astonishing how British and
patriotic was my new friend Mr. Morris. His newspaper was Conservative and
highly orthodox, and in time of war-scares there was an uncompromising
Jingoism in its leaders. They were inspired by the proprietor. The Church, the State, the House of Lords (who knows if the estimable little man may not have cherished hopes of a peerage himself?) were the things that Mr. Morris believed in. In religion he did not tolerate Broad Church, nor in politics any dallying with democrats. But these things, after all, were but a pastime; the opera, especially during the last year or two, was the serious preoccupation of his life.
'Charmin' little girl of yours, Wynman,' I overheard
him whisper to father as we were moving on; 'might bring her one
night to the opera, now. Always the same box, you know. Pit tier, No. 100.
Say Thursday;' and without waiting for an answer, for he was
evidently accustomed to having his wishes acceded to, Mr. Morris slipped
away, and was presently in deep confabulation with the Leader of the
Opposition.
On the following Thursday we found ourselves in Mr. Morris's
opera-box.
It was a brilliant night. All the beauties, with all their tiaras on,
were ranged in dazzling groups round the house. Two famous sisters
(one married to a marquis, and the other on the way to espouse a German princeling) were dressed exactly alike, and exhibited precisely the same pensive smile and the same drooping bouquet. They were, however, to-night entirely alone, filling the large box with their pink sleeves and their radiant beauty. Just above them, Lady Susan received a procession of smart young men all the evening. One after the other, the smart young men were convulsed with laughter; you could see their stolid faces getting pink and crinkled as they bent forward to catch what the lady said. In the next box a well-got-up mother and a pretty, badly-dressed girl shared the same cavalier between them; it was impossible to tell which he admired the least. An elderly lady, in pale blue satin and black pearls, exhibited a young and sheepish-looking husband. Mr. Valentine Redmond was supposed to be occupying a stall, but his little smirk and his huge white buttonhole appeared in every box on the grand tier that night. A number of 'cultured' people in the stalls had open books of the score on their knees, and never raised their heads to
the stage all the evening. They were playing Tristan und Isolde.
Mr. Albert Morris swept with his glasses the crimson horse-shoe, on
which the white shoulders and clear dresses of the women made spots and
dots of light, and settled himself in his chair with a small grunt of
approval. He felt, in a way, responsible for that brilliant house; he was
one of the people who had revived the moribund opera, and had made it once
more the most fashionable lounge in London. True, he distrusted Wagner and
all his works, but he knew there was 'money in him'--for a
season. He was more proud of his sway behind the scenes than of any other
influence he possessed. He prided himself on discovering budding Pattis and
Melbas, on unearthing unknown tenors and discovering baritones of genius.
The potins of the greenroom, the little
quarrels behind the scenes, were, I verily believe, the joy of his
existence. He had always a good story to tell about the stars of the
company. To spring a new prima donna on the town was the height of his
ambition.
One liked Mr. Albert Morris at once. He was immensely comic, and had a
slow, fat, drawling voice which made his stories irresistible. He was also
delightfully candid. Like all the men of his race, he was easily touched by
music, and when the famous soprano, in white satin, with her hair down her
back, gave forth an operatic lament, I noticed a large tear coursing its
way down Mr. Albert Morris's rubicund cheek and immaculate
shirtfront.
'Ah, these things make me feel, Miss Wynman,' he whispered;
'but then, you see, I'm a wicked old sinner. It's only you
charming young ladies who are so hard.'
It was impossible not to laugh, especially when Mr. Morris put on a gold
pince-nez and, holding the book of words a long way off, tried to find out
what the story was.
'What's it all about, now? Don't understand German. Oh,
here we are. Act I. "They tremble and convulsively put their
hands to their hearts, then again press them to their foreheads. Their eyes
meet anew, sink in confusion, and once more fasten on each other with looks
of increasing,passion." Hum! ...
ISOLDE
(sinking on his breast), Faithlessly fondest!
TRISTAN
(pressing her to hint with fire), Deathlessly dearest!"
Ah! very unfortunate now, as she's going to marry the other Johnnie.
Never have any luck, these poor little heroines. Beautiful high that! ...
She's in great form to-night.' But later on Mr. Morris was again
bewildered by the language of the libretto, which he insisted on reading
aloud:
'"O highest, wholest,
Fairest,
fiercest,
Brimmingest bliss!
Priceless! peerless!
Fixed
and fearless!
Blind and breathless"....
Now, I call that exaggerated, don't you know. Did you ever talk to
Mrs. Wynman like that now, Wynman? Nobody ever says that sort of thing to
me.'
But in spite of Mr. Morris's objections to the Wagnerian methods,
our evening at the
opera ended amiably all round. Before we separated that night he had given father a commission for a big canvas.
'Samson and Delilah' was to be the subject of the picture,
for Mr. Morris had a taste for the good old themes. And yet when the
picture was half finished he began to see that it was rather out of date
for a modern house.
'Should like you to put Miss Peggy in, now!' said Mr. Morris
one day, as we all three sat criticising the huge canvas. 'Nort
suitable for Delilah, eh?' It was one of his peculiarities that he
pronounced 'not' and 'got' like 'nort'
and 'gort.' 'Want a more robust model? Nort at all. Just
the sort of little girl like Miss Peggy.' But father was inexorable.
I had sat to him as a Bacchante, as a village maiden, and as a nun, but for
Delilah he would have none of me. Mr. Morris was obviously
disappointed.
He used to be always dropping in to see how 'Samson and
Delilah' was getting on, and he not infrequently stayed to lunch.
'Charmin'--hashed mutton--just what I like.
Anythin' does for me. Gort a passion for baked potatoes, dear,'
declared Mr. Morris, who feasted like Lucullus at home. It was
another of his peculiarities, by-the-bye, that he usually addressed the whole female sex as 'dear.' Mr. Morris chaffed everybody, from the editor of his paper to the cabman who drove him to the City. He even chaffed Christina.
On one celebrated occasion, when Christina had turned vegetarian, she
sat eating nothing but watercress, lettuce, and endive all through
lunch.
'My heavens!' said Mr. Morris at last, adjusting his
eyeglass, and regarding Christina placidly munching a third plate of raw
green stuff, 'is this a beautiful woman or a rumminatin'
animal?'
From that day forward Christina ate fish, meat, and fowl like the rest
of the family.
'Samson and Delilah' was finished at last, and to celebrate
the hanging of the picture there was to be a little supper in the white
dining-room in Piccadilly, at which a Royal personage was expected to be
present.
But Mr. Morris was not to eat his supper with Royalty in Piccadilly that
night. On the morning of the party--a foggy November day--Mr.
Morris's valet drove up to our door in a
hansom. His white, twitching face told us the worst. Albert Morris was dead.
And so, after all, his millions had not been able to save him from what
he dreaded--a sudden and a comparatively early death. The
servant's scared face was painful to see; he had been genuinely
attached to Mr. Morris, and he had entered his room that morning with tea
and letters to find the electric light still burning, and the figure of his
master propped up in bed with a book in the hand that had been cold for
many hours. It was a French book, the valet said; 'Fort comme la
Mort' he thought the name was. Albert Morris had drawn his last
breath while reading his favourite author.
And that was the end.... One had a choky feeling in the throat when one
thought of it.... Of course, in stories and plays it is only the death of
the young, the handsome, and the virtuous which is meant to rouse our
deepest pity. Yet in real life it is often the figure of an Albert
Morris--stout, genial, worldly, rolling in wealth, and terrified at
death--which most readily claims our tears. Of the earth earthy, we
can only picture them in their
clubs or at our dinner-tables. In the grand drama of death it seems impossible that they should ever take a part--they, the heroes of half a dozen farces, the authors of half a hundred mots.
morning's walk, than I should be apt to see in a week on Fifth Avenue
or Broadway. Your tailors, now, they are one of the most remarkable of your
institutions, if one may say so. You English ladies, too, are just
perfectly lovely. Your high-bred repose is perfectly fascinating; and you
are, I should judge, more affectionate than American women? I should say,
now, that you had more heart? The trouble is that our society girls
don't begin to have any. Why, there was an English nobleman, Sir John
Lacklands, in New York last winter. That man was over seventy-two years of
age. Well, he is about to be married to one of the youngest buds of this
season, the daughter of one of our most prominent railroad kings
father, the millionaire, who's to be the happy man."'
London, and if Mr. Van Schuyler's face fell a little when confronted
with papa's portraits, he was lavish in his admiration of the
beautiful room. 'We don't begin to have anything like this in
New York,' he said, giving a comprehensive look round. 'Our
artists either can't afford to furnish a studio (nobody buys American
pictures on our side), or else they sort of overdo the thing. Too much
tapestry, too many suits of mail, too many mandolins, and too many ivory
crucifixes. There was a man who studied in Paris, and thought he'd go
home and do the "society act" as well as paint portraits of the
"four hundred." Well, that man was as much fun as a goat. He
just got as thin as a rail and as bald as a coot trying to work the
"society racket." I tell you, he had a rocky time. He took a
huge studio in one of the most fashionable parts of New York, furnished it
perfectly elegantly, and began by painting one of our society
belles--for nothing. Then he used to lend his studio to Polish
pianists and Spanish dancing-girls, just to get the "four
hundred" inside his house; and they used to crowd right in, and drink
his tea and his punch, and go right away and get their
portraits painted by a third-rate Frenchman who had fixed up an atelier
next door. Why, I tell you, that Frenchman --' and here Mr. Van
Schuyler was fairly launched on another stream of talk, which lasted,
without intermission, until he rose, rather abruptly, to go. First he made
us a low bow, a bow so deep that I have only seen it equalled by that of a
Russian attaché, and then he
reconsidered the question and shook hands with us, one after the other,
very high up in the air. He was evidently under the impression that this
was the latest mode of salutation.
thought that, on the whole, she preferred people who talked less and who
said more. He had, to be sure, an enormous admiration for
Englishwomen--especially the sort of young woman who rides to hounds,
sculls a boat, and bags her own grouse. He constantly assured us that, if
we would 'cross the herring-pond' and spend a winter in New
York or Washington, we should at once attain the rank of 'raging
belles,' though we as constantly disclaimed all intention of
competing with the home-grown article on the other side of the Atlantic.
But every day, as July verged on August, and everyone was thinking of the
moors, and Homburg, and Aix, Mr. Van Schuyler grew more and more civil. He
looked unutterable things. Hardly a day passed without a gorgeous bunch of
roses being sent. I began to wonder what life was like in New York; if it
was all roses, and devotion, and boxes at the play? My family began to
regard me with unwonted tenderness and consideration, and it was obvious
that they half expected Mr. Elisha Van Schuyler might carry me off by the
next ocean greyhound. Qualms of conscience-an unwonted
experi-
ence with me--began to assail me, and more than once I asked myself
whether I liked this young man chiefly for himself or for his dollars, when
that little dinner put an unexpected end to my doubts.
huge Chinese umbrellas over the tables threw curious little shadows on the
faces of the tea-drinkers. All around, pretty women were nodding and
smiling at their bachelor friends. Over yonder, the new beauty was
obviously being made love to by somebody else's husband; while inside
the cool, carpetless clubhouse could be seen the profiles of an elderly,
painted personage in a muslin gown with pink ribbons, and of a bored,
handsome young man who was endeavouring to make peace with the irate lady.
At the next table, two smart City men were lighting their cigarettes after
tea.
the stars appear one by one above the fat, bronze-coloured elms. Mr. Elisha
Van Schuyler drew his chair a little closer to mine.
haven't you, to have ... a fairly good time--yourself?'
around all the time with your own wife.... If he didn't like the young
man, she didn't care, any way. He was just perfectly sweet.... Mr. Van
Schuyler (she always alluded to her husband as Mr. Van Schuyler) was just
perfectly devoted to Miss Peggy; he had never allowed anything to interfere
with his affection for Miss Peggy. And English young ladies were perfectly
lovely, any way. Mrs. Van Schuyler did not believe in trying to make
one's husband domestic. If he didn't care for domesticity,
neither did she. She just despised it, and meant to live in a hotel.
ing at an easel. For M. Rene was a painter, one of the new school of
vibristes. He did the most extraordinary
little landscapes, all in pink, and mauve, and arsenic-green stripes, which
looked well enough about ten yards off, but which were bewildering enough,
to our British eyes, when inspected at close quarters. Other French
painters, however, were enthusiastic over his work.
'Tiens--très fort, ce garçon!' they would
say, gazing at a mountain put in with mauve and rose-coloured lines;
'beaucoup de v'lan; très-amusant. Il est dans le
mouvement, celui-là; il tient de Monet.' Accustomed to the
treacly sunset landscape, as depicted annually on the walls of Burlington
House, we were not a little amazed at M. Rend's
'vibrations'--notes of dazzling sunlight and white open
air. Like most of his painter-compatriots, he was very amusing. For the
French artist, unlike his English brother, has a number of theories, which
he can usually express in a more or less attractive way. To be sure, he is
generally a pessimist; but to mention this is only to say that the French
artist is eminently modern. And if M. René was a pessimist, he was
an
infinitely diverting one. He was one of the very few young men of our
acquaintance who amused Christina.
of 1889,' was always turning up. Even before the mid-day breakfast,
he would run down to the harbour to see the English yachts come in or out,
or stroll with us to the flower market, and come back with his arms full of
mimosa, anemones, and violets. Or he would take us both off for a
day's painting in the mountains; at least, he and Christina used to
paint, and I used to lie on my back and look on, and eat the sweetmeats
which he thoughtfully provided.
moment I fancy M. René was convinced of my hopeless attachment.
making himself a false stomach with two or three sofa-cushions than he had
to putting on a cardboard nose or running about on all-fours. As the
'Beast,' indeed, he was delightful, wearing my new sable boa as
a tail, and wooing 'Beauty,' in the person of our schoolgirl,
with quite irrepressible ardour. In our 'Pierrot' scenes, too,
he was charming, taking my infidelities (as Pierrette) with the prettiest
grace in the world. The whole thing was quaint, artistic, delightful. M.
René was the hero of the ball that followed. We were to leave the
next day.
painter grew sentimental, and at dinner, at the hotel, I think he managed
to shed a tear.
passage for my sake. Now and again he sends a 'Figaro' or a
'Gaulois' containing a fervid article about his pictures, for
M. René, it would seem, is on the way to fame; and once or twice he
has written to say that he intends to come and make serious studies of
ces étonnants brouillards de Londres.
But he never comes, nor does he, I shrewdly suspect, intend to. Paris has
swallowed him up.
frock-coat, sitting down meekly over the teacups and talking of
'elevating the drama' and 'improving the public
taste,' you have a vision of Mr. Duncan Clive as he used to appear in
our drawing-room. He was an actor-manager, so he had to talk about
improving the public taste--and yet keep one eye on the box office. He
spent fabulous sums on the production of his pieces, and all the town would
flock to see his real Empire furniture and his genuine Aubusson
carpets.
Clive was announced. There he stood in the flesh, my favourite stage-lover,
looking very blue about the jaw and very dazzling about the necktie, and he
waited a second or two, holding back the heavy portière, just as he
always did when he wished to make an effective entrance on the stage. Then
he stepped forward rapidly, with a brilliant smile, shaking hands with
father and making me a low and deferential bow.
mounted Hedda Gabler, had there been a part big enough for
him to play; he was capable of producing Maeterlinck, but for his doubts
about filling the stalls. To see him humbly asking the opinion of the
critics at one of his 'first night' suppers on the stage of the
Proscenium Theatre was a curious and instructive spectacle.
and how, one gruesome night, when he was shivering in the slush, he had
made a vow that he would produce Shakspearian plays at a London theatre
before he was thirty years of age. Other days, when the sun shone and the
wind rioted out of doors, he would recall a rose-shaded drawing-room window
giving on a blue sea, and a gentle-voiced mother who read Browning to him
as he sat on soft cushions at her feet... No, certainly the accounts of Mr.
Duncan Clive's early training did not, as his stage-carpenter would
have expressed it, 'join'; but I am firmly convinced that,
while he was talking to you, while his deep-set, hungry grey eyes sought
inspiration now in yours, and now in the fairyland inside the fire, he
believed for the moment what he was saying. Most women liked to listen to
Duncan Clive's confidences, especially as Mrs. Duncan Clive did not
usually accompany him when he paid afternoon calls. He had married the
'walking lady' of a travelling company some years ago, but this
fact by no means interfered with his success with the sex. Who cares
whether Orlando, Charles Surface, or young Mirabel has a wife in Bayswater
or a troop of brats in
Bedford Park? Not even the most romantic schoolgirl cares. Young Mirabel
carries the glamour of the footlights with him wherever he goes.
in which a masked ball is supposed to take place. Duncan Clive had not had
time to change his dress, and he now stood at the door, with brown
grease-paint on his cheek and blue pencil lines round his eyes, smiling and
welcoming his guests.
stifling, and the footlights below, with the electric lights in the
'flies,' cast an unbecoming radiance on many a dyed head and
wrinkled visage. In the distance a middle-aged and faded woman, covered in
diamonds, had engaged Mr. Clive in close confabulation.
Thalia. Never mention the stage if you talk to him, my dear. Always discuss
horses; he likes to be taken for a cavalry man.'
have most to say. One heard her enquiring feverishly about 'Brighton
A's,' and expressing doubts about the future of Grand Trunks.
She wished to be well, too, with Mrs. Stanley Goring, and detained that
lady's hand in her own while she shot several killing glances over her
shoulder at the critic of 'The Daily Telephone.' Mr. Duncan
Clive had pressed my hand and murmured something pretty when I arrived, but
he had not yet found time to come and speak to me.
turned out to be that of Mr. Duncan Clive. With the grease-paint still on
his lips, my idol was imprinting a farewell salute on the bismuth-whitened
arm of Miss Lalage Leigh, who laughed as she slammed the carriage-door.
butler brought up a bunch of orchids from Mr. Van Schuyler and a letter
containing an invitation to dinner with Mr. Julian Clancy.
'bulls' have always been words of strange fascination for me,
probably because I am totally ignorant of everything that goes on in the
City. It came over me like madness that I wanted to have a little gamble,
and Mr. John Ford offered to give me a 'straight tip,' as he
called it, about Patagonians. And I, who never possessed more than
1l. 10s.
altogether
during my whole life, felt quite dissipated and worldly and reckless as we
discussed the 'little flutter' which I was to undertake. There
is hardly anything so infectious as the disease of gambling.
which was Greek to me, but which sounded very reckless.
Christina slips out of the room when the doorbell rings. Nobody contradicts
me. It reminds me of once, long ago, when I was ill.
in attendance. I am getting accustomed to this, if not to the ineffable
Young Person in black silk who presides at Mme Virginie's, and who
always leaves me, after one of our lengthened and heating interviews, with
the pleasing impression that I am undersized, hopelessly plain, and dressed
in shocking taste. Her piercing black eyes look me through; they discover
the weak points in the cut of my nethermost petticoat, and I dare swear, if
the truth be told, that she is perfectly aware that I have a small hole in
the heel of my stocking.
to me, and I finally put my signature on a parchment, which makes one feel
for all the world as if one were signing a death-warrant. There are the
relations, too, unknown aunts and cousins from the provinces and the
suburbs, who suddenly appear, asking one disagreeable questions about
one's age, and who generally sigh, and 'hope it will all be for
the best.' Then there is the advice, the reams of good advice, which
they and my other friends shower upon me.
'Twentieth Century,' and we bend curiously over the box as the
maid lifts gingerly out a garment of shimmering white and silver from under
a layer of tulle.
Page 131
Christina and I gasped, as Mr. Elisha Van Schuyler at last paused,
though apparently more to point his story than to take breath.
In appearance he was tall, but not so broad-shouldered as an Englishman
of his height would have been, he had a dapper little pointed beard and
moustache, and keen, intelligent eyes. His coat was made by a tailor in
Savile Row.
We had never seen an American gentleman. Transatlantic women we had met
by the score; admired their gowns, laughed at their stories, and secretly
envied their unfailing vivacity; but none of the New Yorkers and
Philadelphians that we had known in London had ever appeared to have, or
seem to have wasted a thought on, any male belongings. Therefore, when Mr.
Elisha Van Schuyler presented himself with a letter of introduction from
her Grace of Birmingham (who had known him in her early days in America),
it was with a feeling of keen curiosity that we undertook to show him the
studio and its contents.
Our studio is one of the 'show' ones of
Page 132
Page 133
Page 135
When the heavy tapestry curtains had finally swung back behind him,
Christina called my attention to the fact that, both together, we had only
been allowed to put in three sentences, so entirely had our Transatlantic
guest monopolised the conversation. 'I thought they always said that
American women did all the talking,' said Christina drily; 'but
this young man seems to have a fancy for monologues. I timed one of his
stories, that about General Horace Porter and--what's the other
man's name?--Chauncey Depew, and it lasted exactly seventeen
minutes by the clock.
Page 136
'Never mind that,' I retorted, 'this American is going
to be amusing.'
And in truth he turned out to be charming. After a while, when he took
to coming pretty often, even Christina did not mind the length of Mr. Van
Schuyler's anecdotes. He had, as I took occasion to point out to
Christina more than once, that desirable thing in man or woman, a
'twinkling eye,' and he had also a pretty taste in flowers and
bonbonnières, and a perfect mania for giving theatre parties, with
dainty little suppers afterwards. And later on, when we knew him better, he
had an inexhaustible fund of excellent, if slightly irreverent,
stories.
He had his little peculiarities, to be sure. He was never tired of
asking questions about the Royal Family and the House of Lords, and
once--one night when we were all dining with him at the Savoy--he
made us write out a list of English duchesses, to see how many there
were.
'But I don't know any,' I objected, 'except the
Duchess of Birmingham, and she's an American.'
Page 137
'Mercy! We don't count her,' said Mr. Elisha Van
Schuyler.
He was fond of asking tiresome questions, too, about the birthplaces of
famous people in London; and he never looked at me, I am convinced, without
seeing me against a fancy background of the Tower, Windsor Castle, and
Stratford-on-Avon. I sometimes feel that he expected me to live up to a
famous past.
But Mr. Van Schuyler's stay in London was not without its
distractions. He wanted to know everybody, and everybody seemed pleased to
know him; he wished all his friends to 'have a good
time'--at his expense. He was generosity itself. One could not
express the vaguest wish without its being immediately carried out. His
generosity even took the form of inviting his rivals to dinner, and, what
astonished me even more, sending one in with them. There was nothing mean
or narrow-minded about our new American friend. And yet, though expansive
and voluble, we seemed to know him no more intimately at the end of three
months than at the end of his first call. Was there, under all his
gregariousness, a deep-seated reserve? Christina
Page 138
Page 139
It was at Hurlingham that the last act of the comedy was played. The
polo ground was thick with wide-sleeved, slim-looking women, and with
broad-shouldered military men, whose necks were bronzed by Indian suns.
Here one caught the profile of some country-bred girl, with neat, fair
plaits tucked away under a straw hat, and there a radiant vision of dainty
laces and a delicate rose-pink visage half hidden under a vast parasol.
Carefully made-up old men walked mincingly along. ogling the prettiest
faces as they passed, and mentally comparing the beauties of 1892 with
those more fascinating young creatures of thirty years ago. It was a mild,
grey-skied afternoon of mid-July, and the sound of the Coldstream
Guards' band came softly over the lime-scented air. On the lawn in
front of the club-house the white-jacketed waiters ran quickly to and fro
with trays of tea and strawberries, and the checkered light of the
Page 140
Mr. Van Schuyler was more than usually confidential that afternoon. He
told me how he was 'just perfectly fascinated' with London and
with London girls; how he should like to live here (with a sigh), and how,
if he couldn't do that, he meant to come 'just all the
time.' He had had, thanks to us, a perfectly beautiful time. He
should never forget it.
Somebody had given a dinner, after the polo, and now we were sitting on
the terrace drinking our coffee, listening to the metallic music of the
Hungarian band, and watching
Page 141
'I wonder now, if you would like Tuxedo? Like most American
things, it's on a larger scale than anything you have on this
side--'
'Larger or not,' I said hastily, 'I shall never see
it. You know I am always sea-sick. I shall never cross the
Atlantic.'
'Well, now, I call that rough on us! I had just made up my mind
that when we were married--'
'Married, Mr. Van Schuyler?'
'Why, yes. I guess' (now and again, when he forgot he was in
London, Mr. Van Schuyler would let drop an occasional 'guess')
'Mamie and I must fix it up soon, if we are ever going to.
Mamie's a society girl in Buffalo, and although I'm willing she
should have a good time as long as ever she wants to, still, I think three
years is long enough for a fellow to be kept waiting. Don't you agree
with me, Miss Peggy?'
For a minute I was too astonished to speak. 'Y--es,' I
hastened to say. 'Three years is rather a long time. But
then you've managed,
Page 142
'Well, I should smile! I imagine Mamie would allow that I had
better keep my hand in all the time. And when we settle down in New York
(I've been sending cablegrams about a house on Fifth Avenue all this
week) I hope you'll come over and make us quite a long visit. Why, you
would be just a raging, tearing belle.'
I smiled, and said I should have to make Mrs. Van Schuyler's
acquaintance over here; and so we talked it over, and I proffered my
congratulations, while Mr. Van Schuyler took my hand and held it very hard
as he informed me that he meant to settle down in double harness and be a
model husband.
Next year he brought his wife to see us. At first sight she revealed
herself as a restless, talkative, flirtatious little person, who had, like
her husband, a passion for having 'a good time.' She had
brought a cousin--a young man--'along,' as she
explained, so her husband shouldn't have to go around shopping with
her. He always got mad when she went shopping. She expected it was poky,
anyhow, going
Page 143
While Mrs. Van Schuyler was there her husband was strangely silent. But
it turned out, on investigation, that he did not appear to find the bond of
wedlock galling. She allowed him plenty of rope, and he was always to be
found straying about at the very end of the tether. So far, I have not
heard of either of the Van Schuylers having applied for a divorce.
Page 144CHAPTER XI
AFTER breakfast there was nothing pleasanter one could do than
to sit out in the gravelled garden of the hotel under the palm-trees, and,
unfurling a green-lined umbrella, to bask like a cat in the warmth. And it
was here, generally with an offering of flowers, that M. René
Levasseur used to join us, with his English sailor hat, his gauzy Parisian
tie, and a shepherd's plaid shawl gracefully disposed round his
shoulders. Skirmishing and giggling heralded his approach. He was on
intimate terms with everybody in the hotel; he had confidences for the
landlady, bon-bons for the children, and, if I am not mistaken, a special
greeting for the 'boots.'
In appearance he was hardly a typical Frenchman. Blond, thin, and pale,
he had only the beginnings of a beard, while his slightly stooping
shoulders betrayed the habit of bend-
Page 145
Page 147
Page 148
First we were civil to him because we thought he was rather clever and
impecunious; but we learnt, later on, that he was rich, and that the cheap
sailor hat and faded shawl were part of his pose.
'Frenchmen, whatever you may say against them, are never
snobbish,' I announced one day to Christina. 'When do you ever
hear them talk about their money?'
'No, just as in England it is bad taste to talk of one's
religion. Money is their religion, you know.'
It was our first winter in the South. The spell of the Riviera was over
us. The lazy days crept by, filled with the scent of violets, the warmth of
the sunshine, the magnificent panorama of the littoral. Our nights were
devoted to cotillons, but I never could remember afterwards what we did
during those sunny days.
Our painter, who had claimed our acquaintance from having seen
father's pictures in the 'great, the unique, the epoch-making
Exposition
Page 149
One day M. René painted me. He did me in a scarlet gown, with a
scarlet parasol, in full sunlight, against the blue Mediterranean, and I
remember he painted my face in scarlet and purple zigzags. Even my worst
enemy has never accused me of vanity, but I must say I was annoyed.
'Do not be afraid, Mademoiselle. I shall send it to New York. You
will never see it again. Those good Americans only speak of our school.
Every millionaire of New York desires a Claude Monet, or, failing him, one
of his disciples,' said M. René soothingly; and, to be sure,
on reflection, it did not mratter much if my face appeared like a
gaily-coloured zebra on the other side of the Atlantic.
Page 150
But it was at night, when we went to dance at one of the villas or one
of the hotels, that M. René was in his element. Even your most
pessimistic Frenchman will valse--if you give him the chance. He
danced madly, breathlessly, abominably; but, as a leader of cotillons, our
painter was quite unapproachable. His tact, his
finesse, his gaiety were admirable. How
easily we amused ourselves during those winter nights! The drives back,
after the ball, along the bay, packed into the small hotel omnibus, with
our hands full of toys and ribbons and flowers--the spoils of the
evening--while a large white moon lit up the coast, and the pink and
yellow villas were hushed for the night among the orange-trees and palms.
How pleased M. René looked when I brought home a lapful of tinsel
ribbons and tea-roses! He had begun to assume little airs of
semi-proprietorship which were amusing; I think he already suspected me of
cherishing a hopeless passion for him.
'Tenez, je vous aime bien, Mlle Marguerite,' said M.
René one day; 'vous savez bien que je suis fou de vous. Mais
... je ne voudrai pas vous épouser ... mais non, mais non!
Page 151
"Much obliged to you, but I'm sure I don't want you to
do so!' I replied, with some acerbity. I always answered him in
English. The French tongue is not my strong point, but when I speak my
native language to a foreigner I invariably shout. 'Without being
indiscreet, M. Levasseur, may I ask why?'
We were climbing, through some orange-groves, up a hill, and the
glistening green leaves overhead were powdered with bloom and heavy with
fruit. He tore a spray of orange-blossom down, and stuck it gingerly
through my plaits. 'Très jolie, la mariée,' he
said, laughing; 'mais très difficile à amuser--O,
mais bien difficile.'
There was a fatuity about this little scene which made me
thoughtful--for a week. Not that I alone was suspected of inclining my
eyes in our painter's direction. No one, however unlikely, was safe in
this regard, no one, from the stout, elderly landlady to the youngest
school-girl in the hotel. We were one and all supposed to take a tender
interest in his proceedings. But I never realised this quite until the
night of the tableaux vivants, from which
Page 152
He was invaluable in our tableaux vivants.
We did it all between us, he and I, and it involved the sending of dozens
of notes on M. Rene's part; weird little missives, written half in
French, half in English, which were sufficiently bewildering at
first:--'Merci, dear friend, de votre amabilité.
C'est donc convenu? Vous me prêtez une queue, et je serai une
bête tout à fait convenable. On répète
aujourd'hui à quatre heures. Il y aura du thé. En
seriez-vous de la petite fête?--Wery faithfully yours,
RENÉ LEVASSEUR.'
'Wery' was nice enough as an example of 'English as
she is spoke,' but M. René's devotion was expressed in
other extraordinary English phrases which he had just missed catching from
English ladies in pensions and hotels. Nothing would remove the impression
that 'my dearling' was a proper and ordinary way of addressing
a woman.
Like most Frenchmen he had no self-consciousness (the absence of this
defect was made up for, I suppose, by exaggerated personal vanity); he had,
therefore, no more objection to
Page 153
The morning broke grey and stormy, and great waves tipped with white
were lashing the pebbles on the beach as I sat in the hotel garden, tired
after our late night. Christina had insisted on remaining upstairs to
superintend the packing.
Presently something dark fell in my lap. It was a bouquet of votive
violets, while M. René's quizzical face at an open window above
announced to me my assailant.
'Comment, toute seule?' In a moment a leg appeared over the
balcony, something bounded out, and M. René was bowing low in front
of me.
Page 154
'Pauvre Mees Marguerite!' he murmured.
'Why "poor" Miss Marguerite?' I asked in a high
voice, so as to make sure that he understood.
'Vous vous en allez--comme ça, en Angleterre?
C'est si triste--là-bas.'
'Oh no, it isn't. We are going back to the London season, you
know. We manage to amuse ourselves over there, although you can't
imagine it, immersed as we are in the outer darkness.'
And then M. René told me of his hopes of a visit to London some
day, when the stormy waters of the Channel should have subsided enough for
him to adventure on the wild and desperate journey. He told me of the
experiences of a friend of his in London, of a fortnight spent at a French
hotel near Leicester Square; of the hideosities of the English Sunday, of
the flat-soled boots of ces dames, of the
equally unexciting conversational efforts of ces
messieurs; all the prejudices and preconceptions which the
Parisian packs up in his portmanteau on leaving Paris and retains intact on
his return to his beloved capital.
Page 155
'Ah, but London is charming all the same,' I objected.
The wind had dropped, and the sun was already turning the sea-pines to a
delicate greenish-silver. The day--our final day--was to be fine
after all.
But it was time to go. We were not, however, to leave in the ordinary
and conventional way, in a hotel omnibus and an express train, but a large
party of people were to drive us in brakes and carriages to the Italian
frontier, and we were all to dine together at Ventimiglia before we took
the train for Genoa. M. René sat close behind me in the brake, and
whispered reassuringly into my ear as we dashed along the mountain road
with the Mediterranean spread out below us and the rocky heights to the
left. At the vine-covered trattoria, where we stopped to drink Chianti and
to rest the horses, it was M. René who was so anxious we should all
dance a farewell valse in the dusty and deserted
salon, while someone strummed a tune on the
jingling, worn piano, which only woke up once a week, when the peasants
danced on Sundays. At Ventimiglia, where we all walked out to see the view,
our
Page 156
But everything comes to an end. Dinner was over, and now we were already
in the railway carriage, with our friends crowding round the open door. And
what a charming leave-taking it was! Everybody brought a farewell gift; a
bunch of roses, a basket of peaches, a Spanish fan, a china
frog--every kind of trifle that one can give--and
take--without being compromised. The engine was snorting, mother was
snugly ensconced, and Christina was getting out her favourite books; the
guards had three times announced the imminent departure of the train, and
still M. René, climbing once more into the carriage, knelt, in mock
tragedy, at our feet. A horrible suspicion came over us that he meant to
come, too. But a final whistle sounded. M. René rose to his feet,
and, crushing my fingers, bent over me as he whispered tenderly,
soothingly, reassuringly the words:--
'L'avenir est aux audacieux.... Je viendrai!'
Needless to say, my Parisian admirer has not yet braved the terrors of
the Channel
Page 157
Page 158CHAPTER XII
DUNCAN CLIVE'S Hamlet had taken the town. Christina
roundly declared it was a revolting exhibition; but I don't know good
acting from bad, so this last reading of the great part was good enough for
me. True, it was a smug, sentimental, South Kensingtonian Hamlet, but I, in
common with the rest of the public, became enthusiastic over Mr. Duncan
Clive. We are only human, and my ardour was possibly not unconnected with
the fact that the manager of the Proscenium Theatre was the fashion.
Fashions in art are eminently contagious.
He had the look of a Roman emperor. His large round head, his square,
clean-shaven jaw, and his broad shoulders made him an effective stage
figure, though in private life he often enough looked depressed and
bilious, and affected a humble and slightly apologetic manner. If you can
picture Nero or Caligula, in a sublime
Page 159
'Whether he is a great actor or not,' I argued one day with
Christina, 'at any rate you must admit that he has done a great deal
for the stage.'
'My dear, you mean for the stage-carpenter,' replied my
sister, in an aggravatingly conclusive tone of voice.
Ours was the sort of house to which everybody goes. From ambassadors to
interviewers, there was hardly anybody we didn't know, and Christina
and I were told to be civil to all and sundry, but there was no need to
admonish me to be civil to the new Hamlet.
I was in the studio, squeezing out colours on to father's palette,
one day when Mr. Duncan
Page 160
Father was to paint him as Hamlet for the next Academy, and he had
chosen to be done, not with Yorick's skull or in the famous soliloquy,
but in the scene with Guildenstern, where he snaps the pipe in two.
'Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' was the
line to be depicted; and to be sure, Duncan Clive made an imposing figure
enough in his sombre doublet, standing with his chin a little forward, and
his eyes turned suspiciously towards the spectator. It was characteristic
of the man to have chosen that particular episode, that especial pose, for
he was above all things undecided and distrustful. He wanted to be
'in the movement,' but he wished to be well with the British
public. He would like to have
Page 161
He asked everybody's advice--that was one of his chief
attractions in the eyes of women--and he even asked mine.
Mr. Duncan Clive had beautiful, suggestive hands, which he used a good
deal when he talked, and a wandering, shifty eye, which travelled all round
the room even when he bent towards you in one of his many confidences. He
had interminable confidences to make. He liked to talk about his early
life; only, as his imagination was vivid, and his memory defective, his
early life was apt to be coloured by the mood of the moment. On dreary,
dark November days, when the trees outside seemed to ooze grime and soot,
he would tell you, in thrilling tones, that he began life barefoot, selling
newspapers in the streets or calling cabs at the theatre doors;
Page 162
Page 163
But this glamour, to be sure, rather interferes with the due enjoyment
of one's idol, who is apt to be surrounded by admiring devotees. Does
Orlando--in white gardenia and patent-leather boots--but offer
you his arm to go down to supper, and you are pursued by a crowd of
admiring ladies who hope to snatch him from you. You are permitted to have
neither your cavalier nor your supper. You gaze wistfully at the salads and
aspics, while an elderly lady buttonholes Orlando, reminding him archly
that they met, six years ago, in a railway carriage in Switzerland, and
proceeds on the strength of this acquaintanceship to introduce to him her
three nieces from Huddersfield, who are so devoted to dear Mr. Clive's
acting. Lady Susan takes him by the arm into a distant corner, from whence
he is presently dug out by the Duchess of Birmingham, who is 'just
dying to present him' to Miss Van Hoyt. The successful actor-manager
is always engulfed in a sea of petticoats.
Page 164
But all this I could have borne if it had not been for Lalage Leigh. She
was the last straw. I could have forgiven him his wife--she
didn't seem to count--and I could have forgiven him Miss
Montmorency, the leading lady, for I suspected him of being jealous of her
success with the dress-circle; but for Miss Lalage Leigh, who played the
pert chambermaids in comedy, and who undertook the 'singing
fairies' in Shakspearian productions, for her I had no
toleration.
We had just had a card for a supper party on the stage of the Proscenium
Theatre, and the matter was being discussed.
'In my young days,' said mother doubtfully, 'girls
wouldn't have been taken to supper parties behind the
scenes.'
'They're tremendously good fun,' said Lady Susan, who
was paying one of her seven-minutes' visits; 'and quite good
form, you know, and all that sort of thing. Lady Rougemont never misses one
of Duncan's parties, and, what's more, she brings her daughter.
So do Mrs. Stanley Goring, and most of that lot. You won't meet any
actresses there, my dear lady, I can tell you.'
Page 165
'We might as well go to a crush in Mayfair, then,' said
Christina.
'Oh, it's not as bad as all that,' replied Lady Susan.
'What I meant to say was, that Miss Leigh is the only actress who
ever appears at Duncan's suppers, and she is perfectly good form, you
know. Her father was a dean.'
'They always are,' said Christina; but Lady Susan pretended
not to hear.
At half-past eleven on the night in question we drove up to the
Proscenium just as the audience was streaming out. It was the hundredth
night of a piece in three acts, called Hypocrisy, which had
drawn the town for some three months. Going down the soft-carpeted
staircase, lighted by pink-shaded lamps, and lined with mirrors and laurel
wreaths culled by Duncan Clive on his last American tour, we passed the
entrance to the stalls, the open door revealing a now empty house with rows
of pale pink-and-white chairs, and then, mounting a step or two, turned
sharply to the right, where a narrow door gave on to the
'wings.' The stage was 'set' with the last act of
Hypocrisy, a scene which depicted the precincts of the
'Camellia Club,'
Page 166
One or two modish women, notorious for their Bohemian tastes, had
brought their young daughters, who, surprised, delighted, and a little bit
frightened at the novel scene in which they found themselves, whispered
together in corners, all a-flutter with excitement and curiosity. The
critics, imperturbable as usual, preserved a mask-like expression of
countenance while they listened to the confidences of one or two leading
actors on the vexed subject of their parts; and a phalanx of men about
town, a trifle bald about the temples, a little weary about the eyes,
gradually gathered on the stage. All these exquisitely-dressed individuals
addressed the actor-manager as 'Duncan,' pressed the hand,
while they whispered a compliment into the ear, of Miss Lalage Leigh, and
then distributed themselves among the society dames who graced the scene
with their presence. Meanwhile, the heat was
Page 167
'That's Mrs. Stanley Goring. Good family, rich, nice husband,
but goes in for the stage, don't you know,' whispered Lady
Susan; 'she's never happy unless she's got Duncan to lunch
or supper.'
A buffet had been hastily erected by a dozen men in theatrical livery,
and here Cabinet Ministers, fashionable doctors, blond Jews, white-headed
generals, eminent tragedians, and the 'press' scrambled for
champagne bottles, sandwiches, and cigars. A stout, red-faced man, who
looked like a navvy in evening dress, was surrounded by a little court, all
anxious to hear what he said. 'That is Brown, the Stock Exchange
speculator,' continued Lady Susan; 'he makes
"corners" in things, and people want to know which way the
wind's going'to blow. I'm just going to make love to him
myself; I want a straight tip about Lake Shores. There's Percy
Whitemore, the young man from the
Page 168
Meanwhile Mrs. Duncan Clive, in a drab silk gown, hovered vaguely, with
an apologetic smile, in the background, and a gallant old general, who was
devoted to the stage, surprised her very much by detaining her in
conversation. Miss Montmorency, who, it was supposed, had not only a
'past' but a 'present,' had swept out, smothered in
a fur pelisse and point lace, directly the play was over. As Lady Susan had
predicted, Miss Lalage Leigh was the only actress there.
For the daughter of an eminent ecclesiastic, I must say that Miss Leigh
displayed a considerable knowledge of the ways of an effete and
over-civilised world. She was a very pretty woman--even with that
flaunting dab of rouge on each cheek and those deep-blue smudges round her
eyes; even with that fixed, conventional smile and that languorous
professional glance. Already a little circle of men surrounded her, so that
it was almost impossible to approach, but it was to Mr. Brown, the Stock
Exchange magnate, that she seemed to
Page 169
'I do think this sort of thing is over-rated, don't
you?' I whispered to Christina. They were bringing on a fresh supply
of champagne now, and the men were beginning to smoke and tell stories; the
smart women were slipping out with their young daughters through the
flapping canvas doors. Father thought it was time to go, and so did I.
Picking up our skirts, we stepped cautiously along the dusty world
behind the scenes, threading our way through virgin forests, dungeon walls,
and flowering June meadows to the stage door. It was pitch dark, but we
could see outside stood a neat brougham and a man's back.
The back, as we emerged into the street,
Page 170
It was an evidently not unrehearsed stage idyl.
Page 171CHAPTER XIII
'CHRISTINA,' I said thoughtfully one day when we
were alone, 'you are a young woman of sense and observation. Did it
not occur to you, when Mr. John Ford dined here last night, that he had the
cachet, the unmistakable appearance of a
husband?'
'What do you mean, Peggy? What ridiculous notions you always have.
Why, everybody knows that John Ford is not, and has never been,
married.'
'Oh, that's nothing,' I retorted; 'I tell you he
was born to be henpecked, and to have a carriage with fat horses, and never
drive in it, and to pay long, expensive milliners' bills. The man
looks like a husband. Some men don't, and never will; let them marry
three times, and they never look as he looks.'
'Well, he hasn't shown any indecent haste about taking a
wife,' said Christina. 'He must be every day of
fifty.'
Page 172
'No,' I said, meditatively, 'he is forty-six--
mettons forty-six. He likes French cooking
and Italian operas (dear old fossils like the Trovatore and
the Traviata), he is slightly rotund, he will give his wife
a great many diamonds, and he will probably want to live in Prince's
Gate. Now, if I were to marry a stockbroker, I would never wear diamonds.
It is so like the City to wear diamonds. As a mere matter of taste, I
should have nothing but sapphires and pearls.... And I should draw the line
at Prince's Gate.'
'As you have only seen the man twice in your whole existence, I
don't think you need disturb yourself about the locality you will
inhabit with him--just yet.'
'Christina, don't interrupt my day-dream. As a matter of
fact, I should insist on Mayfair. Not Charles Street, it's too gloomy;
nor South Audley Street, it's too noisy; but, say, Park Street, or one
of those cosy little cross streets--a red house with a white door and
copper fixings.'
'Brass would be more appropriate for you, my dear girl,'
said Christina, sententiously; and then the thing slipped from my memory,
as the
Page 173
Page 175
John Ford, the well-known stockbroker, had made his first appearance in
our house about a fortnight before. He had been brought to the studio by a
pretty, showy Jewess, who was a great admirer of father's, and who
liked to run in and out at all hours and bring whom she liked. He was tall,
broad-shouldered, and clean-shaven, and had bright blue eyes set in a
square face--a face which was red all over. He was not quite ugly, but
his manners were odd. He was very silent. If he did speak, it was
principally of 'huntin'' and 'shootin'';
but when he left the house he was the possessor of father's new
Academy picture, for which he had offered--in an offhand way, in a
distant corner--the sum of fifteen hundred pounds.
The next time we saw him it was at dinner, at one of our big dinners. It
was one of those nights when I am simple and natural, and my frock happened
to be one of those white, soft, fluffy things, which cost a small fortune
and look so inexpensive.
Page 176
At first the conversation did not flourish, but Mr. John Ford looked
furtively and approvingly out of the corner of his eye as he ate his soup.
'Nice little frock,' he said at last. 'Like to see little
girls in white. Ought always to dress in white.' And this was the
first and last occasion on which Mr. John Ford has ever paid me a
compliment. Talking, as I have said, was somewhat hard work, but before the
dinner was over he had told me most of his tastes and predilections. In a
world where we change our idols every six months, it was refreshing to find
anyone with simple, old-fashioned tastes--a liking for pictures with
sunset skies and waxen-faced maidens, for love stories which end happily,
and for oleaginous Italian melodies. These were the things in fashion in
Mr. John Ford's heyday of youth, and they suggested a capacity for
fidelity which was encouraging. And such is the adaptability of woman and
the egoism of man that before we left the dinner-table Mr. Ford was
convinced that I cared for these things also. But it was not of Academy
pictures and three-volume novels that I wished to talk with Mr. John Ford.
'Contangos,' 'debentures,' 'bears,' and
Page 177
For the rest of the evening Mr. John Ford did not come near me, but
Christina admitted afterwards that he was watching me all the time. And
when he left I was told that my financial affairs were to be seen to at
once. How excited, how dissipated I felt!
During the next few days I received several business-looking blue
envelopes, in Mr. John Ford's handwriting, in which I was informed
that Patagonians were 'dull,' and afterwards that there was a
'boom' in the same financial commodity, and then again that a
fall was expected soon, to be followed by a rise--all of
Page 178
But one day, a week later, I had a shock which will always be a date in
my history. Christina and I were sitting alone over the tea-cups. A blue
business-looking envelope was once more served up on a silver tray. I began
to feel like a Rothschild or a Baring.
'What's this?' I muttered, as I began to seize the
purport of the few neatly-written lines which meandered over a large page.
'He's bought me five shares in Patagonians at
10l. each. I've got to pay
50l. during the next fortnight! Great
heavens!' I gasped. 'Why, I haven't got a penny in the
world! I was only joking--'
'An odd sort of joke, my dear child,' said Christina drily.
'Couldn't you have remembered that rather important fact
before?'
'Oh, I can't pay it! What's to be done? Father must be
told, and--and--I shall never dare to look him in the face
again!'
'Who--father?'
'N--no. Mr. Ford. And I like him so much, with his little
blue eyes, and his face which is red all over.'
Page 179
'Wire to him to come. Explain it nicely,
said Christina, with what I thought then was a devilish calm, as she
produced some telegraph-forms, pushed the ink and pen towards me, and rang
the bell for the man.
In less than an hour John Ford was ushered into the room. Regardless of
appearances, I had had a thoroughly feminine 'cry,' and was now
huddled up on the sofa, with reddened eyelids and roughened hair--a
dismal-looking hostess to receive afternoon callers. He came in, shut the
door, and sat down, gazing at me in astonished silence.
'What's the matter, Miss Wynman?' he said at last.
'Been sending some poor devil about his business, and regretted it
already, eh?'
'No, no, I never send anybody about their
business--I--I--hate business any way. And, oh! why did you
buy all those shares?'
'All those shares? Why, I only got you
50l. worth! I've just bought
6,000l. worth myself.'
'But I haven't got it, and I can't get it! I've
counted my money carefully, and I find I possess exactly 1l.
5s.
7½d..'
Page 180
John Ford laughed. 'Well, I think I can manage to get rid of
'em for you. In fact, I know a chap who wants five more.'
To anyone not blinded by financial terrors the little subterfuge must
have been palpable. As it was, I never saw it till long afterwards.
'Do you really know of someone who wants them? I think you are an
angel!' I said fervently.
John Ford blushed redder than ever, and just for a minute there was an
embarrassing silence. We did not mention Patagonians again, and yet he
stayed quite a long time that afternoon. At parting we looked straight at
each other, and I knew from that minute forward we should be firm allies.
There has never been a moment's doubt, from that day, that we should
get on.
Six months have gone by since that day, and lots of things have
happened. Everyone in the house is very nice to me just now. Father calls
me every minute into the studio to ask my advice. Mother--dear
mother!--looks at me solicitously, and follows me about the house with
a biscuit and a glass of port wine.
Page 181
And to be sure I am tired, very tired. Such quantities of gushing notes
arrive by every post, which all require an enthusiastic answer, and large
brown-paper parcels, with many wrappings, which have to be undone. I might
be qualifying for the treadmill, I have tramped so often up the bare
staircases of empty houses, where elderly ladies, smelling of
gin-and-water, implore me to convince myself how excellent are the
dustbins, and what convenient linen-cupboards there are next to the
garrets. I bring home racking headaches from emporiums in the Tottenham
Court Road, whence I emerge having ordered Louis XVI. clocks for all the
servants' bedrooms, and the particular shade of blue which I detest
for the dining-room chairs. Other days, it is true, I slink out of the shop
with the excuse that the drawing-room carpet which I have been choosing for
the last two hours is for a friend, and that nothing can be decided without
consulting her; but this transparent fabrication is invariably received
with looks of withering scorn by the shopman
Page 182
But the process of gentle, low-voiced bullying which goes on at the
milliner's only leaves one more obstinate, and I think I prefer my
sworn enemy the ineffable Young Person to that other imperious Hebe at the
hat-shop, who looks aggravatingly pretty in every shape, however eccentric,
and who is of opinion that 'Madam cannot do better' than take a
straw saucer trimmed with stuffed birds and strawberries, seeing that Mrs.
Langtry has definitely made it the mode. There are those nervous
interviews, too, with grinning, sporting-looking attorneys in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, when perfectly incomprehensible documents
without stops are read out
Page 183
I am assured--what I can well believe--that it is the first
year which is so trying. Some would have me change the savouries at dinner
constantly, others insist that I must begin with morning prayers, while
another division conjure me not to allow smoking in the dining-room. I am
implored not to object to clubs, am warned about pretty parlour-maids, am
told not to be too credulous, and am supplicated not to show signs of
jealousy, as being quite out of date. A few pray me to be tolerant of old
friends, race-meetings, and cigarettes; while many more urge me to keep an
observant eye on sisters-inlaw, cheque-books, and bills. There is all this,
and, as a final blow, there is the mackerel-kettle!
Page 184
I think, on the whole, the mackerel-kettle has given me more weary days
and sleepless nights than any other article I have had to procure. In every
book on Furnishing we find the mackerel-kettle placed foremost in the list
of indispensable things; in no illustrated catalogue of ironmongery is a
tempting little wood-cut of a mackerel-kettle omitted; and yet in the
flesh, or rather in the metal, the mackerel-kettle for ever eludes us.
Fabulous sums are expended in hansom cabs, scouring the Tottenham Court
Road in pursuit of this phantom article of hardware, and I begin to think
that my chances of happiness may be seriously compromised...
But time flies by. The day is very near, now. One foggy winter afternoon
I toil upstairs to Christina's room, dragging after me, with the help
of the maid, a long, brown, wooden box.
'What do you think has come?' I demand breathlessly,
bursting into the room where Christina is trying to read an article on the
'Under-payment of Feminine Labour' in one of the reviews.
'Put it down, Sarah. Unbuckle the strap, quick!'
Womanlike, my sister throws down the
Page 185
Symbols of the Eternal Feminine, those lengths of glittering satin
flaunt themselves over the sofa and along the floor, lighting up the dim
little room with their sumptuous whiteness, while, like a June cloud, the
foam of tulle floats for an instant in the winter dusk.
It is my wedding gown.