which contained Harold, looked sternly in his flushed and disfigured
countenance. He immediately held his breath, growing from crimson to
purple and from purple to black as she delivered her inaugural address.
“My dear Har’ld,” said she, with crisp distinctness, “you are a vurry
little boy——”
“Hear, hear!” I interpolated, and got a frown from Leila.
“And at three months old your reasoning fahculties are not developed
enough for you to comprehend that what you don’t like may be the best
thing for you. Mary has gone, and Mary will not come back. Henceforth
you are in my cayah, and you will find me fyum, but gentle. However
badly you may act, I shall not punish you.”
Harold hiccoughed and stared up at the bright, intellectual face above
him with round, astonished eyes and open, dribbling mouth.
“Your own sense of what is right and what is wrawng, dormant though it
be at this vurry moment, I intend to awaken and——”
Harold, never before in his brief life harangued after this fashion,
appeared to grasp already the idea that something was wrong. The
expression of astonishment faded, his down-drooped mouth assumed the
bell or trumpet-shape, and, rapidly doubling and undoubling himself with
mechanical regularity, he emitted the most astonishing series of sounds
we had yet heard from him. No caresses were administered for the
assuagement of his woe, no broken English babbled in his infant ears.
The Rules of the System of Child Culture absolutely prohibited petting,
and baby-language was denounced by Miss Cooter as “pynicious.”
As she predicted, Harold left off howling after a certain interval.
“Now I guess you have lyned one lesson already!” said Miss Cooter. “When
you are older, Har’ld, you will cawmprehend that the truest kindness on
your payrents’ part praumpted the separation that has given you pain.
You will have your bottle now; you will say ‘Thank you’ for it, and
ahfter consuming the contents, you will go quietly to sleep.”
But it took a long time to convince the dubious Harold that the
trumpet-shaped, nickel-silver-stoppered vessel tendered by his new
guardian was the equivalent of his beloved and familiar “Maw.” When
finally convinced, he grabbed it without the slightest attempt at saying
“Thank you,” and, with the gloomiest scowl that I have ever beheld upon
a countenance of such pulpy immaturity, applied himself to deglutition.
Miss Cooter shook her head discouragingly.
“This child has a strawngly developed animal nature,” pronounced she—“a
throwback to the primeval savage, I should opine.”
“Delightful! Do buy him a little stone ax and a baby bearskin, Leila,” I
pleaded. “Think what light he will throw upon the Tertiary Period—if
Miss Cooter happens to be right!”
But Miss Cooter shook her head. “He must be environed by softening and
civilizing influences,” said she, “from this vurry moment. Vegetarian
diet is what I should strawngly recommend.” Her eye doubtfully
questioned the rapidly sinking level of the sterilized milk in Harold’s
glass trumpet.
“There is such a thing as a cow-tree, isn’t there?” said Leila
anxiously. “Perhaps Cope might acclimatize one in the tropical house?”
“But while the cow-tree is being acclimatized,” I asked disturbingly,
“upon what is Harold to live?”
“Kindly take this,” said Miss Cooter. “May I trouble you? Please!” she
repeated sternly. But Harold only screwed up his eyes and dug his pinky
fists into them as his monitress took the empty trumpet away, telling us
stories of an atypical and highly-cultured boy baby of her acquaintance
who not only exhibited Chesterfieldian politeness at four months of age,
saying “Please” and “Thank you,” and “Kindly pass the salt,” but
regularly performed its own ablutions, went through breathing exercises
and simple gymnastics, was familiar with the use of the abacus, and
could work out sums in simple addition upon a patent hygienic slate. All
these facts Miss Cooter put before us with convincing eloquence. Her
language was well chosen, her scientific knowledge and technical skill
quite appalling. There was nothing about a baby that she did not
understand, except, perhaps—the baby.
From that day Harold lived under the microscope. Charts of his temper,
as of his temperature, were regularly kept up to date; and his progress,
physical and psychological, was recorded by Miss Cooter in a kind of
ship’s log-book, in which data of meteorological disturbances appeared
with distressing frequency. He was not precocious enough to be
classified as abnormal, or sufficiently original to come under the
heading “Atypical,” or old enough to tell lies, and so be dubbed
imaginative. But that tertiary ancestor from whom, according to Miss
Cooter, he derived his temperament, must have possessed some strength of
character, for from the beginning to the end, Harold’s strongest
prejudice was manifested towards Miss Cooter, his most violent
attachment in the direction of the banished Mary, for whom he howled at
regular intervals until he forgot her, when he became reserved,
distrustful, and apathetic. His intellectual qualities were not of the
kind that responded to scientific forcing. He never learned that an
orange was a sphere, or a rusk an irregular cube. The india-rubber
letters and object-blocks possessed for him no meaning; the colored
balls of the abacus only awakened in him a tepid interest. He was in
texture flabby, and habitually wore an expression of languid
indifference—intensified when Miss Cooter was delivering one of her oral
lectures, to utter boredom. Despite his sanitary surroundings, his
day-nursery, intermediate nursery, and night-nursery, papered, carpeted,
furnished, lighted, ventilated, and warmed upon the most approved
scientific methods, he did not thrive, contracting complaints incidental
to infancy with passionate enthusiasm, and keeping them long after
another child would have done with them. And then he complicated an
unusually violent attack of croup with convulsions, and Miss Cooter
guessed she had better resign the case, which she did “right away,” in
favor of some atypical, imaginative, non-atavistic young American
citizen. When last I looked into the hygienic day-nursery, most of the
educational objects it had contained had vanished—presumably into
cupboards—and Harold was lying in the cotton lap of his recovered Mary,
nursing a stuffed kitten, and sucking an attenuated thumb. The
expression of gloomy boredom had vanished from his countenance as Mary
chanted a rhyme, deplorably lacking in sense and construction, about a
certain Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting to get a little
rabbit-skin to wrap the Baby Bunting in. It afforded Harold such
undisguised delight that I felt sure the rabbit must have burrowed in
tertiary strata, and that the predatory parents of Baby Bunting must
have been the primal type from which Harold hailed. But Miss Cooter, who
could alone have sympathized with my scientific delight in this
discovery, was tossing in mid-Atlantic on her way to the land of the
Stars and Stripes.
We were, however, to meet yet once again under the spangled folds of Old
Glory. It was a year or so later, on board a Hudson River steamboat. She
was prettier than ever, quite beautifully dressed, and her _entourage_
comprised two nurses (a colored “mammy” and a pretty Swiss), a
perambulator with a baby, and a husband. She introduced me to the
husband and the baby, a round, rosy baby, neither atypical nor
atavistic, but just of the common, old-fashioned kind.
“Isn’t he cute!” she exclaimed, with rapture. “Smile at Momma, Baby, and
show um’s pretty toofs!” Then she addressed the child as a “doodleum
ducksey,” while I stood speechless and staring.
My circular gaze awakened memories of the past. She asked after Harold.
“He is very well—now!” I said with point. “May I be pardoned for
remarking that you do not appear to be rearing your own baby upon the
System of Child Culture you formerly followed with such extraordinary
success?”
“No,” said the late Miss Cooter thoughtfully. “No-o!”
“Why not?” I asked, hot with the remembrance of Harold’s sufferings.
Miss Cooter considered, a beautifully manicured forefinger in a dimple
that I had never observed before.
“Why not? You earnestly advocated the system—for other people’s babies.”
“Well,” said the late Miss Cooter, with a burst of candor, “I reckon
because those _were_ other people’s babies. This is mine!”
A HINDERED HONEYMOON
The coffee and liquor stage of a long and elaborate luncheon having been
reached, the rubicund and puffy personage occupying the chair at the
head of the table—number three against the glass partition, east end,
Savoy Grill-room—waved a stout hand, and instantly eight of the nimblest
waiters—two to a double-leaved folding-screen—closed in upon the table
with these aids to privacy. The rubicund personage, attired, like each
of his male guests present, in the elaborate frock-coat, with white
buttonhole bouquet, tender-hued necktie, pale-complexioned waistcoat,
gray trousers, and shiny patent leathers inseparable from a wedding—the
rubicund personage (who was no less a personage than Mr. Otto Funkstein,
managing head of the West End Theatre Syndicate) got upon his legs,
champagne-glass in hand, and proposed the united healths of Lord and
Lady Rustleton.
“For de highly-brivileged nopleman who hos dis day gonferred ubon de
brightest oond lofliest ornamend of de London sdage a disdinguished name
oond an ancient didle I hof noding put gongradulations,” said Mr.
Funkstein, balancing himself upon the tips of his patent-leather toes,
and thrusting his left hand (hairy and adorned with rings of price) in
between the jeweled buttons of his large, double-breasted buff
waistcoat. “For de sdage oond de pooblic dot will lose de most prilliant
star dot has efer dwinkled on de sdage of de West Enf Deatre I hof
nodings poot gommiseration. As de manacher of dot blayhouse I feel vit
de pooblic. As de friend—am I bermitted to say de lofing oond baternal
friend of de late Miss Betsie le Boyntz?”—(tumultuous applause checked
the current of the speaker’s eloquence)—“changed poot dis day in de
dwingling of an eye—in de hooding of a modor-horn—by de machick of a
simble ceremony at de Registrar’s—gonverted from a yoong kirl in de
first dender ploom”—(deafening bravos hailed this flight of poetic
imagination)—“de first dender ploom of peauty oond de early brime of
chenius”—(the lady-guests produced their handkerchiefs)—“into a yoong
vife, desdined ere long to wear upon her lofely prow de goronet of an
English Gountess”—(Otto began to weep freely)—“a Gountess of
Pomphrey.... Potztauzend! de dears dey choke me. Mine dear vriends, I
gannot go on.”
Everybody patted Funkstein upon the back at once. Everybody uttered
something consoling at an identical moment. Mopping his streaming
features with the largest white cambric handkerchief ever seen, the
manager was about to resume, when Lord Rustleton—whose tragic demeanor
at the Registrar’s Office had created a subdued sensation among the
officials there, whose deep depression during the wedding banquet had
been intensified rather than alleviated by frequent bumpers of
champagne, and who had gradually collapsed in his chair during
Funkstein’s address until little save his hair and features remained
above the level of the tablecloth, galvanically rose and, with a soft
attempt to thump the table, cried: “Order!”
“Choke him off,” murmured a smart comedian to his neighbor, “for pity’s
sake. He’s going to tell us how he threw over the swell girl he was
engaged to a month before their wedding—for Petsie’s sake; and how he
has brought his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, and for
ever forfeited the right to call himself an English gentleman. I know,
bless you! I had it all from him last night at the Mummers’ Club, and
this morning at his rooms in Wigmore Street.”
“Rustleton!”
“Order!” yelled Rustleton again.
“Order!” echoed Funkstein, turning a circular pair of rather bibulous
and bloodshot blue eyes upon the protestant bridegroom. “Oond vy order?”
“Permimme to reminyou,” said Rustleton, with laborious distinctness,
“that the present Head of my fammary, the Rironaurable the Earl of
Pomphrey—in poinnofac’, my Fara—is at the present momen’ of speaking in
the enjoymen’ of exhallent health, an’ nowistanning present painfully
strained rela’ions essisting bi’ween us, I have no desire—nor, I feel
convinned, has my wife, Lady Rustleton, any desire—to, in poinnofac’,
usurp his shoes, or play leapfrog over his—in poinnofac’, his coffin.
Therefore, the referen’ of the distinnwished gelleman who, in
poinnofac’, holds the floor, to the coronet of a Countess in premature
conneshion with the brow of my newly-marriwife I am compelled to regard
as absorrutely ram bad form!”
“Tam bad _vat_?” shrieked Funkstein.
Rustleton leaned over the table. His eyes were set in a leaden-hued
countenance. His hair hung lankly over his damp forehead. He nerved
himself for a supreme effort. “Ununerrarrably ram baform!” he said, and
with this polysyllabic utterance fell into a crystal dish of melted ice,
and a comatose condition.
“Bad, bad boy!” said the recently-made Lady Rustleton, biting her
notorious cherry underlip, and darting a brilliant glance at Funkstein
out of her celebrated eyes as Rustleton was snatched from his perilous
position by a strong-armed chorus beauty; and the low comedian, who had
become famous since the production of _The Charity Girl_, dried the
Viscount’s head with a table-napkin and propped him firmly in his chair.
“It is not de Boy, but de man dat drinks it,” giggled Funkstein, with
recovered good temper. “Ach ja, oond also de voman. How many bints hof I
not seen you....”
“That’ll do, thanks,” said the newly-made Viscountess, with her
well-known expression of prim propriety. “Not so much reminiscing, you
know; it’s what poor Tonnie called ‘ahem’d bad form’ just now, didn’t
you, ducky?”
“Don’t call me rucky,” said the gentleman addressed, who was now rapidly
lapsing into the lachrymose stage of his complaint. “Call me a
mirerrable worm or a ‘fernal villain. I reserve both names. Doesn’ a man
who has alienarid the affeshuns of his father, blirid his mother’s
fonnest hopes, and broken his pli’rid word to a fonnanloving woman—girl,
by Jingo——”
“Oh, do dry up about that now, darling!” said Lady Rustleton tartly. “I
dare say she deserved what she got. What you have to remember now is
that you’re married to me, and we shall be spinning away in the
Liverpool Express in another hour, _en route_ for the ocean wave. I
always _said_, when I _did_ have a honeymoon—a real one—I’d have it on
the opening week of the production on a big Atlantic liner. And this is
the trial voyage of the _Regent Street_, and she’s the biggest thing in
ships afloat to-day. Do let’s drink her health!”
The toast was drunk with enthusiasm. Two waiters advanced bearing a
wedding-cake upon a charger. The bride coyly cut a segment from the
mass. It was divided and passed round. The ladies took pieces to dream
on, the men shied at the indigestible morsels. Somebody had the bright
idea of sending a lump to the chauffeur of the bridal motor-car, which
had been waiting in the bright October sunshine, outside in the
palm-adorned courtyard, since one o’clock. A _chassé_ of cognac went
round. Rustleton was shaken into consciousness of his marital
responsibilities and a fur-lined overcoat; everybody kissed Petsie; all
the women cried, Petsie included—but not unbecomingly. Her bridal gown,
a walking-costume of white cloth trimmed with silver braid, contained a
thoroughly contented young woman; her hat, a fascinating creation,
trimmed with a rose-colored bird, a _marquisette_, and a real lace veil,
crowned a completely happy wife. Tonnie possessed nothing extraordinary
in the way of good looks or good brains, it was true; but Tonnie’s wife
was wealthy in these physical attributes. He possessed a high-nosed,
aristocratic old fossil of a father, whose prejudices against a
daughter-in-law taken from the lyric boards must be got over. He owned a
perfectly awful mother, whose ancestral pride and whose three chins
must—nay, should—be leveled with the dust. His sisters, the Ladies
Pope-Baggotte, Petsie said to herself with a smile, were foewomen
unworthy of such steel as is forged in the _coulisses_ of the musical
comedy theaters. Yet should they, too, bite the dust. In a golden
halo—partly hope, partly champagne—she saw Lady Rustleton sweeping,
attired in electrifying gowns, onwards to the conquest of Society. The
greengrocer’s shop in Camberwell, among whose cabbages and potatoes her
infancy had been passed; the Board-School, on whose benches the
first-fruits of knowledge had been garnered, were quite forgotten. Some
other little circumstances connected with the Past were blotted from the
slate of memory by the perfumed sponge of gratified ambition. She bore
the deluge of rice and confetti with dazzling equanimity. She hummed
“Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” as the motor-car, its chauffeur sorely
embarrassed by a giant wedding favor, a pair of elderly slippers tied on
the rear-axle, sped to Euston.
“I’ve got there at last,” said Petsie, as the Express ran into the
Liverpool docks and toiling human ants began to climb up the ship’s
gangways thrust downwards from the beetling gray sides of the biggest of
all modern liners. “I’ve got there at last, I have, and in spite of
Billy Boman. A precious little silly I must have been to take a
hairdresser for a swell; but at seventeen what girl brought up in a
Camberwell backstreet knows a paste solitaire from a real diamond, or a
ready-made suit, bought for thirty bob at a Universal Supply Stores,
from a Bond Street one? And if nice curly hair and a straight nose, a
clear skin, and a good figure were all that’s wanted to make a
gentleman, Billy could have sported himself along with the best. But now
he’s dead, and I’ve married again into the Peerage, and I shall sit on
the Captain’s right at the center saloon table, not only as the
prettiest woman on board his big new ship, but as a bride and a
Viscountess into the bargain. Wake up, Tonnie dear. You’ve slept all the
way from Euston, and there’s a plank to climb.”
“Eh?” Tonnie stared with glassy eyes at the scurrying crowds of human
figures, the piled-up trucks of giant trunks and dress-baskets soaring
aloft at the end of donkey-engine cables, to vanish into the bowels of
the marine leviathan. “Eh! What! Hang it! How confoundedly my head
aches! Funkstein must have given us a brutally unwholesome luncheon. Why
did I allow him to entertain us? I felt from the first it was a hideous
mistake.”
“Why did you let the fellows persuade you to drink more of the Boy than
is good for you, you soft-headed old darling?” Petsie gurgled. She
smoothed the lank hair of her new-made spouse, and, reaching down his
hat from the netting, crowned him with it, and bounded out of the
reserved first-class compartment like a lively little rubber ball.
“Here’s Timms, your man, with my new maid. No, thank you, Simpkins. You
can take the traveling-bags. I may be a woman of title, but I mean to
carry my jewel-case myself. Come along into the Ark, Tonnie, with the
other couples. What number did you say belonged to our cabin, darling?”
“The Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four,” said Rustleton, with a
pallid smile, as a white-capped, gold-banded official hurried forward to
relieve the Viscountess of her coroneted jewel-case.
“How tweedlums!” sighed Petsie, retaining firm hold of the leather
repository of her brand-new diamond tiara and necklace, not to mention
all the rings and brooches and bangles reaped from the admiring
occupants of the orchestra-stalls at the West End Theatre during the
tumultuously successful run of _The Charity Girl_.
“It costs for the trip—five days, four hours, and sixteen
minutes—between Queenstown and the Daunts Rock Lightship,” said
Rustleton, with a heavy groan, “exactly two hundred and seventy-five
guineas. Ha, ha!” He laughed hollowly.
“But why did you choose such a screamingly swell suite, you wicked,
wasteful duckums?” cried the bride coquettishly, as their guide switched
on the electric light and revealed a chaste and sumptuous nest of
apartments in carved and inlaid mahogany, finished in white enamel with
artistic touches of gold, and hung with tapestry of a greeny-blue and
livid flesh-color.
“Because I can’t afford it,” said the dismal bridegroom, “and because
the meals and all that will be served here separately and privately.” He
sank limply upon a sumptuous lounge, and hurled an extinct cigarette-end
into an open fireplace surrounded by beaten brass and crowned by a
mantel in rose-colored marble. “The execrable ordeal of the first cabin
dining-room, with its crowds of gross, commonplace, high-spirited,
hungry feeders will thus be spared us. You need never set foot in the
Ladies’ Drawing-room; the Lounge and the Smoking-room shall equally be
shunned by me. Exercise on the Promenade Deck is a necessity. We shall
take it daily, and take it together, my _incognito_ preserved by a
motor-cap and goggles, your privacy ensured by a silk—two silk—veils.”
He smiled wanly. “I have roughly laid down these lines, formulated this
plan, for the maintenance of our privacy without making any allowance
for the exigencies of the weather and the condition of the sea. But if I
should be prostrated—and I am an exceedingly bad sailor at the best of
times—remember, dearest, that a tumbler of hot water administered every
ten minutes, alternately with a slice of iced lemon, should feverish
symptoms intervene, is not a panacea, but an alleviation, as my cousin,
Hambridge Ost, would say. I rather wonder what Hambridge is saying now.
He possesses an extraordinary faculty of being scathingly sarcastic at
the expense of persons who deserve censure. An unpleasant sensation in
my spine gives me the impression—do you ever have those
impressions?—that he is exercising that faculty now—and at my expense.
Timms, I will ask you to unpack my dressing-gown and papooshes, and
then, if you, my darling, do not object, I will lie down comfortably in
my own room and have a cup of tea. If I might make a suggestion,
dearest, it is that you would tell your maid to get out _your_
dressing-gown and _your_ slippers, and lie down comfortably in _your_
own room and have a cup of tea.”
The twenty-six thousand ton Atlantic flyer moved gracefully down the
Mersey, the last flutter of handkerchiefs died away on the stage, the
last head was pulled back over the vessel’s rail, the seething tumult of
settling down reduced itself to a hive-like buzzing. The _Regent
Street’s_ passenger-list comprised quite a number of notabilities
connected with Art and the Drama, a promising crop of American
millionaires, an ex-Viceroy of India, and a singularly gifted
orang-utan, the biggest sensation of the London season, who had dined
with the Lord Mayor and Corporation at the Mansion House, and was now
crossing the ocean to fulfill a roof-garden engagement in New York, and
be entertained at a freak supper by six of the supreme leaders of
American Society. Petsie pondered the passenger-list with a pouting lip.
She heard from her enraptured maid of the glories of the floating palace
in which the first week of her honeymoon was to be spent as she sipped
the cup of tea recommended by Rustleton.