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BY E. F. BENSON
THE FREAKS OF MAYFAIR
THE TORTOISE
MICHAEL
THE OAKLEYITES
DAVID BLAIZE
ARUNDEL
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK
[Illustration: The Compleat Snobs]
THE FREAKS OF
MAYFAIR
BY E. F. BENSON
AUTHOR OF “THE TORTOISE,”
“MICHAEL,” “DODO,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
GEORGE PLANK
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATED
TO
FRANK EYES
AND
KINDLY EARS
THE LIST OF CONTENTS
I. THE COMPLEAT SNOBS _page_ 13
II. AUNT GEORGIE 31
III. QUACK-QUACK 49
IV. THE POISON OF ASPS 71
V. THE SEA-GREEN INCORRUPTIBLE 85
VI. THE ETERNALLY UNCOMPROMISED 107
VII. THE GRIZZLY KITTENS 125
VIII. CLIMBERS:
I. THE HORIZONTAL 143
IX. CLIMBERS:
II. THE PERPENDICULAR 161
X. THE SPIRITUAL PASTOR 183
XI. ‘SING FOR YOUR DINNER’ 199
XII. THE PRAISERS OF PAST TIME 217
THE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_reproduced from drawings by_
GEORGE PLANK
1. THE COMPLEAT SNOBS _Frontispiece_
2. AUNT GEORGIE _page_ 36
3. QUACK-QUACK 52
4. POISON OF ASPS 70
5. THE SEA-GREEN INCORRUPTIBLE 98
6. THE GRIZZLY KITTENS 132
7. CLIMBERS: I. THE HORIZONTAL 148
8. CLIMBERS: II. THE PERPENDICULAR 164
CHAPTER ONE
THE COMPLEAT SNOBS
There is no more joyous couple in all Mayfair than Sir Louis Marigold,
Bart., M.P., and Lady Mary Marigold, and whether they are at Marigold
Park, Bucks, or at Homburg, or in their spacious residence in Berkeley
Square, their lives form one unbroken round of pomp and successful
achievement. She was the daughter of an obscure Irish Earl, and when she
married her husband was still hard at work building up the business of
Marigold & Sons. Those were strenuous days, and the profession of
money-getting made it necessary for him to indulge his snobbishness only
as a hobby. But she, like the good wife she has always been to him, took
care of his hobby, as of a stamp-collection, and constantly enriched it
with specimens of her own acquisition, being a snob of purest ray serene
herself. She is the undoubted descendant of Arrahmedear, king of
Donegal, in which salubrious county her brother, the present Earl, is
steadily drinking himself to death in the intervals of farming his
fifty-acre estate. When he has succeeded in completely poisoning himself
with whisky, she will become Countess of Ballamuck herself, since the
title descends, in default of male heirs, in the female line, and there
will be what I hope it is not irreverent to call high old times in
Berkeley Square and Marigold Park.
When first they married her husband always playfully called her ‘The
Princess’ (being the lineal descendant of that remarkable monarch King
Arrahmedear), and what began in play soon sobered into a habit. But when
she is a real contemporary peeress, it is probable that he will drop the
appellation derived from legendary kings, and call her Countess. There
will be no hint of badinage about that: Countess she will be, and the
papers will be full of little paragraphs about the movements of Sir
Louis Marigold, Bart., M.P., and the Countess of Ballamuck.... There is
just the faintest suggestion of Ouida-ism and impropriety which gives
such announcements a peculiar relish.
Now there is no snob so profound as the well-born snob, especially in
the female line. She (in this case Lady Mary Marigold) knows about it
from the inside, and is aware of all it means to be the daughter of
earls, not to mention kings. Her husband therefore, having been born of
an obscure commercial family, was not originally so gifted as his wife,
but by industry and study he has now practically caught her up, and
they run together in an amicable rose-coloured dead-heat. Like all the
finer endowments, as that of poetry, pure snobbishness is born not
acquired, and lowly as was his birth, the fairy-godmother who visited
his infant cradle brought this golden gift with her, and with the same
instinct for what is worth having that has always distinguished him, he
did not squander or dissipate her bounty, but hoarded and polished and
perfected it. When he was quite a little boy he used to dream about
marquises, and, if a feverish cold added a touch of daring to his
slumbers, about kings and queens; now with the reward that waits upon
childhood’s aspirations, it has all come true. Already his son (the
first-born of the future countess) has married the Lady Something
Something, daughter of a marquis, and there are great hopes about a
widowed Bishop for his daughter.
It might seem that this episcopal anchorage was but a poor fulfilment of
the prayers of her papa, but any who think that can form no adequate
impression of the completeness of Sir Louis’s snobbishness. For the real
snob is he who worships success and distinction whether that success is
hall-marked with coronets, wealth, or gaiters. To achieve success in
the eyes of the world is to him the greatest of human accomplishments,
and to be acquainted, or better still, connected with those who have
done so, and best of all to be identified with them, constitutes the joy
of life. Sir Louis has a profound admiration for his wife, his son, his
son’s wife, but he perhaps reserves his levels of highest complacency
for himself, and with all his busy loving glances at the dazzling
objects round him, he never really diverts his gaze from his own career.
It is for his own success in life that he reserves his most sincere
respect.
While his wife and he are thus in every sense perfect snobs, as far as
perfection can be attained in this tentative world, they, like all other
professors in great branches of knowledge, specialize in one particular
department, and theirs is Birth. It is, of course, a great joy to Lady
Mary Marigold to see the wife of a Cabinet Minister, of an African
explorer, of an ambassador pass out of her dining-room at the conclusion
of dinner, while she stands by the door and, shaking an admonitory
finger at her husband till her bracelets rattle, says, ‘Now, Sir
Baronet, don’t be too long’; it is a joy also to him to move to the
other end of the table between the ambassador and the Cabinet Minister
and say, ‘My lady won’t grudge your Excellency time to drink another
glass of port and have a small cigar’; but most of all they love the
hour when these manœuvres are enacted with members of the aristocracy,
or, as has happened several times in this last year or two (for they are
really among the tree-tops), with those for whom, to the exclusion of
themselves and other guests, finger-bowls are provided. On these
occasions, that is when Royalty is present, a sort of seizure is liable
to come upon them, and for a minute or two one or other sinks back in
his chair in a dazed condition consequent upon so much happiness. A
foretaste of the bliss of Nirvana is theirs, and Sir Louis’s eyes have
been known to fill with happy, happy tears on seeing a Prince show my
lady how to eat a cherry backwards, stalk first.
In the early days of their marriage, when, as Mr. Marigold, he came back
tired with his day’s work to his modest dwelling in Oakley Street, Birth
was his hobby, and instead of relaxing his tired brain over the perusal
of trashy novels or the playing of fruitless games of patience, like so
many who have no sense of the value of time, he and she would sit
tranquilly, one on each side of the fireplace, with a reading-lamp
conveniently placed between them, and dive into the sunlit waters of the
Peerage. One happy Christmas Day they found that the present of each to
the other was a copy of this beautiful book, and after this delicious
coincidence, they kept the pleasant custom up, and always presented each
other with Peerages at Christmas, so that now they have both of them a
complete set for the last twenty-three years. Their son, Oswald Owen
Vivian Lancelot, was true to parental tradition and tendency, and
rapturous was the day when, at the age of fourteen, after hours of
careful work, he gave his mother on her birthday the gift he had been
secretly preparing for her, namely the roll of his own ancestry, neatly
illuminated. It was somewhat lop-sided, for very few Marigolds had been
discoverable, but away, away back went the other line of the descent
through Earls and coronets innumerable till it reached the original and
unique King Arrahmedear of Donegal, above whose glorious name he had
illuminated a royal crown. It was entirely Oswald Owen Vivian Lancelot’s
own idea, and when he became engaged to the daughter of a marquis, his
mother felt that she had known it would happen for years.
Owing probably to the large number of Jews and journalists and brewers
and pawnbrokers who have been ennobled during the long Liberal tenure of
office, this particular brand of snobbishness has rather fallen into
neglect, and many of the brightest snobs of Mayfair consider the cult of
the mere peerage a somewhat Victorian pursuit. But the more earnest
practitioners, like Lady Mary and Sir Louis Marigold, remain unaffected
by such shallowness. They argue that the conferring of a peerage is
still a symbol of success, and, loyalist to the core, consider that
those who are good enough for the King are good enough for them.
Besides, they have found by experience that they actually do feel
greater raptures in the presence of Royalty than in that of subjects of
the realm, and among subjects of the realm they like dukes better than
marquises, marquises than earls, earls than viscounts. It is not implied
that the pleasurableness of their internal sensations would indicate to
them the rank of a total stranger whose name they were ignorant of, but
knowing his name and his rank, they find that their delight in converse
with him increases according to his precedence. Many pleasures are
wholly matters of the imagination, and this may be one, but the
hallucination is in this case, as in that of other nervous disorders,
quite complete. And when a year or two ago Lady Mary was dangerously ill
with appendicitis, her husband sensibly assuaged the deep and genuine
anxiety he felt for her, by going through, day after day, the cards of
the eminent people who had called to make enquiries. A prince (a very
eminent one) was so condescending as to call twice, once on a Monday and
once on the following Thursday. To this day Sir Louis cannot but believe
that the better news the doctor gave him about my lady on that happy
afternoon, was somehow connected with the magic of the repeated visit.
It has been mentioned that Sir Louis is in the habit of calling his wife
‘Princess’; it has also been hinted that she alludes to him as ‘Sir
Baronet.’ There is a touch of badinage, of playfulness in both these
titles, but below the playfulness is a substratum of seriousness. For
she is descended from kings so ancient that nobody knows anything about
them, and he is a real Baronet, and since his title in ordinary use is
that of a mere knight, she and others of their intimates are accustomed
to call him Sir Baronet, in order to mark the difference between him and
such people as provincial mayors or eminent actors and musicians. It
must be supposed, too, that he is far from discouraging this, since he
has printed on his cards, ‘Sir Louis Marigold, Bart., M.P.,’ in full. It
may be unusual, but then there are, unfortunately, not many Baronets who
take a proper pride in the honours with which their Sovereign has
decorated them or their ancestors. Marquises and earls put the degree of
their nobility on their cards instead of just calling themselves ‘Lord,’
and surely a Baronet cannot go wrong in following so august an example.
But there is another custom of his to which perhaps exception may be
taken, for it is his habit when entertaining a luncheon-party at which
mere commoners are present (this is not a frequent occurrence) to step
jauntily along in his proper precedence to the dining-room, leaving the
less exalted persons to follow. He does it in a careless, unconscious
manner, and this manner is by no means put on: he walks in front of
lowlier commoners instinctively: he does not think about it: his legs
just take him. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add that instinct is
not so strong with him as to go in before any lady, even if she were his
own washerwoman, for the obligations of chivalry outweigh with him even
those of nobility. It has always been so with the true aristocrat, and
it is so with him. Perhaps if a Suffragette were present he might go on
ahead, for he considers that all women who hold any views but his on
that subject have unsexed themselves. In his more indulgent moments he
alludes to them as ‘deluded wretches.’
His politics are of course Tory. A Tory Prime Minister honoured himself
by recommending the King to honour Sir Louis, and much time and a good
deal of money spent in the Tory cause make it quite likely that a
further honour will some time he conferred upon him when (and if) his
party ever gets back into power. It is significant, anyhow, that he has
made several visits lately to the Heralds’ College, where the shape of
Viscounts’ coronets seemed to interest him a good deal, for since the
motto of his business life, which has proved so successful, was ‘Prepare
well in advance,’ it is likely that it will apply in such matters as
these as well, and it may safely be assumed that on that happy day his
spoons and forks will be found to be already engraved with the honour
conferred on him. To be sure, should this happen before Lady Mary’s
brother finally succumbs to the insidious bottle, she will find herself
a step lower than her previous rank had been, by becoming a Viscountess
instead of remaining an Earl’s daughter. But, on the other hand, this
will be but a temporary eclipse, for it cannot be so very long before
she comes from under her cloud again on the demise of the dipsomaniac,
and shines forth as an independent Countess. The whole affair, moreover,
has been talked out so constantly by them that they are sure to have
come to a wise decision based on the true principles of snobbishness.
Snobbishness is no superficial thing with them, or indeed with anybody;
it springs from fountains as deep as those of character or religion. Now
that between them they have got the Peerage practically by heart, its
study, though they often read over favourite passages together, no
longer takes them much time or conscious thought, it merely permeates
them like Christianity or the moral qualities. It tinges all they do,
and they do a great many very kind and considerate and generous things.
Sir Baronet is the most liberal giver; no appeal made for a deserving
and charitable object ever came to him in vain, but deep in his heart
all the time that he is signing his munificent cheque, the thankful
cries of the poor folk he has succoured sound in his ears, as they
murmur, ‘Thank you, Sir Baronet!’ ‘Bless you, Sir Baronet!’ Lady Mary
is equally open-handed, especially when children and dumb animals are
concerned, and she declares she can almost hear the thumping of the
dogs’ tails as they strive to say, ‘Thank you, my lady!’ ‘Bless your
ladyship’s kind heart.’
Occasionally, out of mere exuberance, Sir Baronet sounds an insincere
note. He wrote once to Oswald bidding him bring his wife to dinner in
these terms: ‘Bring my lady along to dinner on Tuesday week, my boy. No
party, just ourselves, and I think the Princess told me the French
Ambassador and the Duchess of Middlesex were to take their cutlets with
us.’ ... But all the time his pen was so trembling with gratification
that for the moment Oswald thought his father must have a fit of
shivering, till the truer explanation dawned on him, and he realized
that the usually neat and careful handwriting was blurred with joy. But
perhaps this little insincerity is but the mark of the most complete
snob of all, who affects to make light of the attainments towards which
his holiest and highest aspirations have been ever directed. Anyhow, one
would be sorry to think that Sir Baronet was sincere over this, for it
would imply that he was getting used to Ambassadors and Dukes, that he
was becoming blasé with a surfeit of aristocracy. That would be too
tragic a fate for so thoroughly amiable an ass.
There is nothing more stimulating in this drab world than to look at
those who intensely enjoy the prosperity which surrounds them, and to
see Sir Baronet stepping along Piccadilly with his springy walk, and his
ruddy face ready to be wreathed in smiles as he takes off his hat to
some social star, is sufficient to reconcile the cynic and the
disappointed, if they have any touch of humanity left in them, to a
world where some people have such a wonderfully pleasant time. Perhaps
if cynics were a little simpler, a little more alive to the possible
joys of existence, they would share some of those raptures themselves. A
princely fortune is no necessity to the snob: it is possible to taste
his joys on a modest competence. But character and thoroughness are
needful: he must read his Peerage till the glamour grows about the
pages, and must value aright the little paragraphs in newspapers which
record the doings of the mighty. Unless men are born with this gift, it
is true they will not enter the highest circle of the Paradiso, but they
should at least be able to leave the Inferno far below them. And as a
matter of fact, most people have a touch (just a touch) of the snob
innate in them, if they will only take the pains to look for it. They
may not have the peerage-mind, but probably there is some sort of
worldly success before which they are willing to truckle. It is worth a
little trouble, in view of the spiritual reward, for the snob always has
an aim in life: he never drifts along a purposeless existence.
The chronicler is tempted to linger a little over these happy and
prosperous persons, and forecast the further glories that inevitably
await them. At present a certain number of the Vere de Veres turn up
their patrician noses when Marigolds are mentioned, which is exceedingly
foolish of them, considering that it is out of Marigolds that the very
best Vere de Veres have been made. The Marigolds will win eminence and
renown by their industry, their riches, and their colossal
respectability. That was how the Vere de Veres became the cream of the
country, and instead of calling the Marigolds ‘those tradesmen,’ they
would be wiser to hail them as cousins who will buttress up some of
their own tottering lines (if their sons and daughters can only manage
to marry into the Marigolds) by reinforcing them with their own vigorous
blood, their wealth, and not least, their respectability. In the next
generation Oswald Owen Vivian Lancelot will be Earl of Ballamuck and
Viscount Marigold, and his children, of whom he has only eleven at
present, will be Members of Parliament, and hard-working soldiers and
diplomatists, with peeresses for sisters. When a few more years have
rolled, the Vere de Veres will have to respect them, for they will be
Vere de Veres, good, strong, honest Vere de Veres, the pick of the
bunch, for with their healthy bodies, active brains, and, above all,
their untarnished respectability, they are precisely the folk on whom
honours pour down in spate. And what _is_ the use of affecting to
despise a family that in a hundred years will number bishops and
ambassadors and generals among its collaterals, and will certainly have
a family banner in St. George’s chapel?
CHAPTER TWO
AUNT GEORGIE
Aunt Georgie’s christian name as bestowed by godparents with silver mugs
at baptism was not Georgiana but simply George. He was in fact an infant
of the male sex according to physical equipment, but it became perfectly
obvious even when he was quite a little boy that he was quite a little
girl. He played with dolls rather than lead soldiers, and cried when he
was promoted to knickerbockers. These peculiarities, sad in one so
young, caused his parents to send him to a boys’ school at the early age
of nine, where they hoped he might learn to take a truer view of
himself. But this wider experience of life seemed but to confirm him in
his delusions, for when he quarrelled with other young gentlemen, he did
not hit them in the face with his fist, but slapped them with the open
hand and pulled their hair. It was observed also that when he ran (which
he did not like doing) he ran from the knees instead of striding from
the hips. He did little, however, either in the way of running or of
quarrelling, for he was of a sedentary and sentimental disposition, and
formed a violent attachment to another young lady, on whom Nature had
bestowed the frame of a male, and they gave each other pieces of their
hair, which were duly returned to their real owners when they had tiffs,
with inexorable notes similar to those by which people break off
engagements. These estrangements were followed by rather oily
reconciliations, in which they vowed eternal friendship again, treated
each other to chocolates and more hair, and would probably have kissed
each other if they had dared. Their unnatural sentiments were
complicated by a streak of odious piety, and they were happiest when,
encased in short surplices, they sang treble together in the school
choir out of one hymn-book.
Public-school life checked the outward manifestation of girlhood, but
Georgie’s essential nature continued to develop in secret. Publicly he
became more or less a male boy, but this was not because he was really
growing into a male boy, but because through ridicule, contempt, and
example he found it more convenient to behave like one. He did not like
boys’ games, but being tall and strong and well-made, and being forced
to take part in them, he played them with considerable success. But he
hated roughness and cold weather and mud, and his infant piety developed
into a sort of sentimental rapture with stained-glass windows and
ecclesiastical rites and church music. His public school was one where
Confession to the Chaplain was, though not insisted on, encouraged, and
Georgie conceived a sort of passion for this athletic young priest, and
poured out to him week by week a farrago of pale and bloodless
peccadilloes, and thought how wonderful he was. Eventually the
embarrassed clergyman, who was of an ingenious turn of mind, but
despaired of ever teaching Georgie manliness, invented a perfectly new
penance for him, and forbade him to come to confession, unless he had
really something desperate to say, more frequently than once every three
weeks. Otherwise, apart from those religious flirtations, Georgie
appeared to be growing up in an ordinary human manner. But, if anyone
had been skilful enough to dissect him down to the marrow of his soul,
he would have found that Georgie was not passing from boyhood into
manhood, but from girlhood into womanhood.
He went up to Oxford, and there, under the sentimental influence of the
city of spires, the last trace of his manhood left him. His father, who,
by one of Nature’s inimitable conjuring tricks, was a bluff old squire,
rather too fond of port now, just as he had been rather too fond of the
first line of the Gaiety Chorus in his youth, longed for Georgie to sow
some wild oats, to get drunk or gated, to get entangled with a girl, to
do anything to show that virility, though sadly latent, existed in him.
But Georgie continued to disappoint those unedifying wishes: he
preferred barley-water to port, and was always working in his room by
ten in the evening, so that he would not have known whether he was gated
or not, and he took no interest in any choruses apart from chapel
choirs, and never got entangled with anybody. Instead he became a Roman
Catholic, and a mixture of port, passion, and apoplexy carried off his
father before he had time to alter his will.
Georgie stepped into his father’s shoes, and continued his own blameless
career. He had an income of some three thousand a year, and a small
place in Sussex, and at the conclusion of his Oxford days, turned over
the place in Sussex to his step-mother and his three plain sisters,
reserving there a couple of rooms for himself, and took a small neat
house in Curzon Street. He was both generous and careful about money,
made his sisters ample allowances, and proceeded to spend the rest of
his income thoughtfully and methodically. He had an excellent taste in
furniture and decorations, though an essentially feminine one, and the
house in Curzon Street became a comfortable and charming little nest,
with Chippendale furniture in the drawing-room and bottles of pink
bath-salts with glass spoons in the bath-room. He had a private den of
his own (though anything less like a den was never seen), with a
looking-glass over the fire-place into which he stuck invitation-cards,
a Chesterfield sofa, on the arm of which there often reposed a piece of
embroidery, a writing-table with all sorts of dainty contrivances, such
as a smelling-bottle, and a little piece of soft sponge in a dish, over
the damp surface of which he drew postage-stamps instead of licking them
with his tongue, and by degrees he got together a collection of carved
jade, which was displayed in a _vitrine_ (vulgarly, a glass case) lined
with velvet and lit inside by electric light. He had a brougham
motor-car, driven by a handsome young chauffeur, whom, if he took the
wrong turning, he called a ‘naughty boy’ through the tube, and was
personally attended by a very smart young parlour-maid, for though he
did not care for girls in any proper manly way, he liked, when he was
sleepy in the morning, to hear the rustle of skirts. His cook, whom he
saw every day after breakfast in his den, was an artiste, and he had a
good cellar of light wines. After lunch and dinner he always made coffee
himself, in Turkish fashion, for his guests, and passed round with it
odd, syrupy liqueurs. His bedroom was merely a woman’s bedroom, with a
blue quilt on the bed, a long cheval-glass on the floor, silver-backed
brushes on the toilet-table and no razors, for a neighbouring barber
came to shave him every morning. In cold weather, when his mauve silk
pyjamas were hung out to warm in front of the fire, the parlour-maid
inserted into his bed a hot-water bottle, jacketed in the same tone of
blue as his quilt. On that Georgie put his soft pink feet, and always
went to sleep immediately.
Here he lived a kind and blameless life, but the life of a sprightly
widow of forty, who is rich and childless, and does not intend to marry
again. In the morning, after seeing his cook, he wrote a few letters (he
did not use the telephone much because it tickled his ear, and he
disliked talking into a little box where other people had talked and
breathed) and these he generally sealed with a signet belonging to his
step-mother’s grandmother, which had a coronet on it. He was a little
snobbish in this regard, in a Victorian
[Illustration: _Aunt Georgie_]
old-fashioned way, for though his step-mother was no sort of relation to
him he took over her relations as cousins, and hunted up the most remote
connections of hers, for adoption, in the Peerage. His letters being
finished he took his soft hat and sat at his club for half an hour
reading the papers. Generally he walked out to lunch, and was called for
by his car about a quarter to three. Sometimes he had a little shopping
to do, and if not, went for a drive, sitting very upright, much on the
look-out for acquaintances, and returned home for tea. After tea he sat
on his sofa working at his embroidery, had a hot bath, and except when,
about twice a week, he had a few people to dine with him, went out to
dinner. He did not play bridge but patience and the piano, both of which
he manipulated with a good deal of skill. When he entertained at his own
house, his guests were chiefly young men with rather waggly walks and
little jerky movements of their hands, and old ladies with whom he was
always a great success, for he understood them so well. He called them
all, young men and old ladies alike, ‘my dear,’ and they had great
gossips together, and they often said Georgie was very wicked, which was
a lie.
He had considerable musical taste, as well as proficiency on the piano,
and very soon his life became a busy one in the sense, at any rate, that
he had very little time for his embroidery. He built out a big room at
the back of his house, and gave tinkling little modern musical parties,
at which he introduced masses of young geniuses to the notice of his
friends. Also he took to practising his piano with some seriousness, and
would often forgo his walk to the club and his perusal of the morning
papers in order to work at his music, and sat at his instrument for two
hours together, with his rings and his handkerchief on the
candle-brackets. His taste was modern, and he liked the kind of piece
about which you are not sure if it is over or not, or what has happened.
He paid quantities of country-house visits to the homes of his old-lady
friends and his step-mother’s cousins, where he would sit in the library
reading and writing his letters till half-past twelve, and take a little
stroll with a brown cape on his arm till lunchtime. He sketched too, and
produced rather messy water-colours of churches and beech-trees, and
made crayon-portraits of his hostess or her boys, which he always sent
her with his letter of thanks for a most pleasant visit, neatly framed.
His portraits of elderly ladies had a certain resemblance to each
other, being based on a formula of a lace cap, a row of pearls, and a
thoughtful expression. He had a similar formula for young men, of which
the chief ingredients were a cricket-shirt and no coat or Adam’s apple,
long eyelashes, and a girlish mouth. He was not good at eyes, so his
sitters were always looking down. After lunch at these most pleasant
visits he went out for a drive in a motor to see some neighbouring point
of interest or to call on some adopted cousin whom he had discovered to
live somewhere about. He rested in his own room after these fatigues and
excitements for an hour before dinner, with his feet up and a
dressing-gown on, and afterwards would work on a crayon-sketch, play the
piano, or make himself agreeable to anybody who was in need of gentle
conversation. Often he would settle down thus in a friend’s house for a
fortnight at a time, in which case he brought his embroidery and his car
with him, and was most useful in taking other guests out for drives, or
bringing home members of a shooting-party. Occasionally, for no reason,
he roused violent antagonism in the breasts of rude brainless men, and
after he had left the smoking-room in the evening, one would sometimes
say to another, ‘Good God! What is it?’
Georgie lived in this whirl of pleasant pursuits for some ten years. The
only disagreeable incident that occurred during this time was that his
attractive chauffeur married his attractive parlour-maid, and for a
little, surrounded by hateful substitutes, he was quite miserable. But
he wooed the selfish pair back again by taking a garage with a flat
above it, where they could keep house, raising Bowles’s wages, and
getting in another parlour-maid when the curse of Eve was on Mrs.
Bowles, and when he was now about thirty-five, Georgie definitely
developed auntishness. As seen above, there were already many symptoms
of it, but now the disease laid firm and incurable hold on him.
His auntishness was of the proverbial maiden-aunt variety, and was
touched with a certain acid and cattish quality that now began to tinge
his hitherto good-natured gossipy ways. As usually happens, he tended to
detect in his friends and acquaintances the defects which he laboured
under himself, and found that Cousin Betty was getting so ill-natured,
and Cousin John had spoken most sarcastically and unkindly to him. His
habits became engrained, and when he went out to dinner, as he continued
to do, he took with him a pair of goloshes in a brown paper parcel, if
he meant to walk home, in case the crossings might be muddy. He was
faithful enough to his old friends, the waggly-walking young men of his
youth, and such of his old ladies who survived, and still went out with
them on sketching-parties when they stayed together in the country, but
otherwise he sought new friends among young men and young women, to whom
he behaved in a rather disconcerting manner, sometimes, especially on
sunny mornings, treating them like contemporaries, and wishing to enter
into their ‘fun,’ sometimes petting them, as if they were children, and
sometimes, as if they were naughty children, getting cross with them. He
wanted in fact to be a girl still, and yet receive the deference due to
a middle-aged woman, which is the _clou_ to maiden-auntishness. He had
little fits of belated and senile naughtiness, and would take a young
man to the Gaiety, and encourage him to point out which of the girls
seemed to him most attractive, and then scold him for his selfishness if
he did not appear eager to come back home with him, and sit for an hour
over the fire until Georgie felt inclined to go to bed. Or, having
become a sort of recognised chaperone in London, he would take a
girl-cousin (step-mother’s side) to a ball, and be vexed with her
because she had not had enough dancing by one o’clock. It must not be
supposed that it was his habit to appear in so odious a light, but it
sometimes happened. To do him justice, he was repentant for his
ill-humour next day, and would arrange a little treat for a boy and a
girl together, driving them down in his car to the Mid-Surrey golf-club,
where they had a game, while he sat and sketched the blue-bells in Kew
Gardens.
By this time his step-mother was dead (Georgie did a lovely crayon of
her after death), and two out of his three plain sisters had married.
The other used often to stay with him in London, and often he would
bring quite a large party of young people down to the house in Sussex,
where they had great romps. Georgie was quite at his best when
entertaining in his own house, and he liked nothing better every now and
then than a pillow-fight in the passage, when, emitting shrill screams
of dismay and rapture, and clad in a discreet dressing-gown over his
mauve silk pyjamas, he laughed himself speechless at the ‘fun,’ and bore
the breakage of the glass of his water-colour pictures with the utmost
good-humour. But when he had had enough himself, he expected that
everybody else should have had enough too, therein disclosing the fell
features of Aunt Georgie.
Georgie did not, as the greyer seas of the forties and fifties began to
engulf him, fall into the errors of grizzly kittens, but took quite
kindly to spectacles when he wanted to read the paper or write his
letters, and made no secret of his annual visit to Harrogate, to purge
himself of the gouty tendencies which he had inherited from his father.
He did not, of course, announce the fact that he had had a fresh supply
of teeth, or that he had instructed his dentist to give a studied
irregularity to them, and it is possible that he used a little hair-dye
on his moustache which he clipped in the new fashion, leaving only two
small tufts of hair like tails below his nostrils, but he quite dropped
pillow-fights, though keeping up his music and his embroidery, and more
than keeping up the increasing ill-nature of his tittle-tattle. He made
great pets of his chauffeur’s children, who in their artless way
sometimes called him ‘Daddy’ or ‘Grandpa.’ He did not quite like either
of these appellations, and their mother was instructed to impress on
their infant minds that he was ‘Mister Uncle Georgie.’ But ‘Miss Auntie
Georgie’ would have been far more appropriate.
It is perhaps needless to add that he has never married and never will.
Soon the second set of girl-friends whom he chose when he first
developed auntishness will be middle-aged women, and as, since then, he
has made quantities of new young friends, his table will never be
destitute of slightly effeminate young men and old ladies. Those are the
sections of humanity with whom he feels most at home, because he has
most in common with them. He makes a fresh will about once every five
years, leaving a good deal of his property to the reigning favourites,
who are probably cousins (of his step-mother’s). But most of them are
cut out at the next revision, because they have shown themselves
‘tarsome,’ or in some way inconsiderate. But probably it will be a long
time before anybody reaps the benefit of these provisions, for apart
from his gout, which is kept in check by his visits to Harrogate,
Georgie is a very healthy old lady. He lives a most wholesome life with
his little walks and drives, and never, never has he committed any
excesses of any sort. These very ageing things, the passions, have never
vexed him, and he will no doubt outlive most of those who from time to
time have been beneficiaries under his will.
After all he has done less harm than most people in the world, for no
one ever heeded his gossip, and even if he has not done much good or
made other people much happier, he has always been quite good and happy
himself, for such malice as he impotently indulged in he much enjoyed,
and he hurt nobody by it.
It would be a very cruel thing to think of sending poor Georgie to Hell;
but it must be confessed that, if he went to Heaven, he would make a
very odd sort of angel.
QUACK-QUACK
CHAPTER THREE
UNDYING INTEREST IN THINGS ABSTRUSE, experimental, or charlatanish keeps
Mrs. Weston perennially young. She has a small pink husband, who desires
nothing more of life than to be allowed a room to himself, regular
meals, a little walk after lunch followed by a nap at his club, and a
quantity of morning and evening papers to read. Indeed it may be said of
him that the morning and evening papers were his first day and will
certainly be his last, for he is the sort of person who will die
suddenly and quietly after dinner in his arm-chair. All those simple
needs are easily supplied him, for when, for reasons to be subsequently
mentioned, he cannot get regular meals at home he procures them at the
Carlton grill-room.
The two have no children, and her husband being so simply provided for,
Mrs. Weston has plenty of leisure to pursue her own weird life. She
began, as most students of the faddish side of life do, by using her
excellent physical health as a starting-point for hypochondria, and
proceeded to cure herself of imaginary ailments with such ruthless
ferocity that if she had not stopped in time, she might really have
become ill. As it was, she arrested her downward course of healing
before it had done anything more than make her thin, and took to another
fad. But she resumed her pleasant plumpness when she embraced
spiritualism, for spiritualism for some obscure reason almost invariably
causes people to lay on flesh.
To begin at the beginning of her quackings, she was about thirty when
the shattering conviction came over her, after reading a little book
about gout, that she entirely consisted of uric acid. This painful
self-revelation caused her husband to become a regular habitué of the
Carlton grill-room, for he was not strong enough to stand the ideal
régime which blasted his once comfortable home. For a day or two he
insisted on continuing his suicidal diet, but he found it impossible to
enjoy his cutlet when his wife told him that all he ate turned the
moment he had swallowed it, into waste products, and that his apparent
appetite was merely the result of fermentation. Such news when he was at
lunch quite spoiled his pleasure and stopped his fermentation. For
herself, she proceeded to obtain body-building materials out of nuts and
cheese, and calorics out of the oil with which she soaked the salads
that were hoary with vegetable salts. All tea and coffee were, of
course, forbidden, since they reeked of purins, while if you drank
anything at meals, you might just as well have a glass of prussic acid
then and there, in order to get it over quicker. Probably if anyone had
told her only to eat between meals, she would have tried that too. But
all day the kitchen boiler rumbled with the ebullition of the oceans of
hot water that had to be drunk in the middle of the morning and the
middle of the afternoon, and before going to bed. It had to be sipped,
and since at each sitting a quart or so must be lodged within her, the
process was a lengthy one, and she could not get out of doors very much.
But exercise and air were provided for by courses of stretchings and
bendings and flickings and kickings done by an open window in front of a
chart and a looking-glass, followed by spells of complete relaxation
(which meant lying down on the floor). Then there were deep-breathing
exercises, in which Mrs. Weston had to draw in her breath very slowly,
hold it till she got purple in the face and the veins stood out like
cords on her benignant forehead, and emit it all in one hurricane-puff.
The dizziness and queer sensations that sometimes followed she took to
be a proof of how much good it was doing her. Strange hungry-looking
visitors used to arrive at queer hours, and talk to their enthralled
pupil in an excited manner about arterio-sclerosis, and chromagens, and
produce out of their pockets little packets of tough food, tasting of
travelling-bags, which they masticated very thoroughly, and which in the
space of a square inch contained the nutritive value of eight mutton
chops and two large helpings of apple tart. Fortified by this they
launched into the functions and derangements of the principal organs of
the body, with an almost obscene wealth of detail, while Mrs. Weston
used to sit in rapt attention to those sybils and long for dinner time
to come in order that she might thwart her uric acid again.
She pursued her meatless course for several weeks with fanatic
enthusiasm, and having been perfectly well before, found that, apart
from a slight falling away of flesh, her iron constitution stood the
strain remarkably well. Then while the nuts were yet in her mouth, so to
speak, it struck her that she ought to go in for breathing exercises
more thoroughly, and found that they led straight into the lap of the
wisdom of the Yogis. This philosophy instantly claimed her whole
attention, and she steeped herself in its manuals, and advertised in the
_Morning Post_ for a Guru. An individual in a turban answered this in
person, but as, after his second visit she found that a
[Illustration: _Quack-Quack_]
valuable ring was missing, which at his bidding she had taken off her
finger in order to be less trammelled by material bonds, she decided to
be her own Guru, and with the chapter on ‘Postures’ open before her,
practised tying herself into knots. Her abstinence from meat came in
useful, since a light diet was recommended by her new ideal in life, so
also did her practice in deep-breathing, for Pranayama was entirely
concerned with that, and when you had mastered Postures and Pranayama
you would live in perfect health and vigour, as long as you chose. Again
her superb physical health stood her in good stead, and she neither
dislocated her limbs from Postures, nor had a single stroke of apoplexy
from holding her breath. During the Yogi attack her husband ceased to
take his meals at the Carlton grill-room, for he was allowed meat again
in moderation. But he always used to go out for a walk when the great
breathings began in the middle of the morning, since he hated the idea
that in the next room Jane was sitting cross-legged on the floor,
exhaling her long-held breath through one nostril while she closed the
other with her finger, muttering ‘Om! Om!’ Long periods of absolute
silence alternated with these mutterings, and it gave him an
uncomfortable feeling to know that Jane was holding her breath all that
time. Away from Chesterfield Street the image of her was less vivid, and
when he returned for lunch Postures were over too, and though rather
stiff and tired, she would declare that she never had known before what
real health meant. This was always a pleasant hearing, and he would
congratulate her on her convalescence, and instantly repent of his
cordiality, because she urged him just to do a couple of Postures a day
and see how he felt.
Then a misfortune which within a couple of days she temporarily called
the turning-point of her life, befell Mrs. Weston, for she caught a
chill (manifestly from posturing on a cold damp day in front of an open
window) which indicated its presence by a simultaneous attack of lumbago
and a streaming cold in the head. This latter made the inhalation of
breath through the nostrils quite impossible, and the former, Postures.
So shut out from the practice of Pranayama and Postures, she came
winging it back from the East, and, happening to come across a copy of
the _Christian Science Journal_, flew to the bosom of Mrs. Eddy. Her
only regret was that she had not left the heathen fold in time to
frustrate the false claims of her indisposition, which had taken a firm
and painful hold of her, but she had scarcely learned by heart the True
Statement of Being when the severity of the symptoms began sensibly to
diminish. In point of fact within three days she was perfectly well
again, as she might have been all along if she had only known in time
that there was no such thing as lumbago. Neither was there such a thing
as uric acid or chromagens, and in consequence, since there was nothing
to fear from disorders that had no existence, she ordered an excellent
dinner that evening, and over ox-tail soup and fish and a roast
pheasant, of all of which she ate heartily, she discoursed to her
husband on the new truth that had risen like dawn over her previously
benighted horizon. But, such is the ingratitude of man, he felt that he
would sooner have eaten his dinner in silence at the grill-room than at
home to the accompaniment of such preposterous harangues. And when,
after dinner, just as he was settling down to a game of patience, Jane
asked him to join with her in the recital of the True Statement of
Being, he replied with some asperity that a True Statement of Balderdash
was a fitter name for such nonsense.