saying, and perhaps none at all in Horace Campbell’s contribution, yet
while each of them really knew the other was a liar, each drank it all
in with the utmost avidity. Such malice as there was about them was
completely impotent malice: it could not possibly matter to Pip
Rippington, for instance, whoever he was, that Mrs. Dealtry and Horace
had been inventing stories about him. That he had founded a golf club
was perfectly true; that Mrs. Dealtry had not been welcomed as a member
of it was true also, though there was a needless _suppressio veri_ about
this fact, as everybody present was perfectly aware of it. But it
amused them in some rancid manner to vent spleen, just as it perhaps
amuses asps to bite. Only, and here was one of Time’s revenges, nobody
ever cared what either of them said. To throw mud enough is proverbially
supposed to ensure the sticking of some of it, but in the case of them
and those like them, the proverb was falsified. They had said that sort
of thing too often and too emphatically for anyone to attach the
smallest importance to it; it was as if their victims had been
inoculated for the poison of asps, and suffered no subsequent
inconvenience from the bite. No one thought of bringing the laws about
libel into play over them, any more than people think about invoking the
protection of those laws against a taxi-driver who compensates himself
in compliments for the tip he has not received. If they have any sense
they get themselves into their houses and leave the vituperative driver
outside. That is just what decent people did with Horace Campbell. He is
outside still, biting the paving-stones.
The pity of it all is the appalling waste among asps of brains,
inventive faculty, and humour. If only their gifts were used to some
laudable or even only innocent purpose, the world in general would gain
a great deal of entertainment, and the asps of the popularity and
success that they secretly crave for. As it is, some sort of moral
ptomaine has infected them, some invasion of microbes that turns their
wit into poison. Whatsoever things are loathsome, whatsoever things are
of ill report, they think of those things. All their wit, too, goes to
waste: nobody cares two straws what they say, and the bitten are
pathetically unconscious of having received any injury whatever. That
fact, perhaps, if they could thoroughly realise it, might draw their
fangs.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SEA-GREEN INCORRUPTIBLE
Constance Lady Whittlemere lives in a huge gloomy house in the very
centre of Mayfair, has a majestic appearance, and is perfectly ready for
the Day of Judgment to come whenever it likes. From the time when she
learned French in the school-room (she talks it with a certain sonorous
air, as if she was preaching a sermon in a cathedral) and played
Diabelli’s celebrated duet in D with the same gifted instructress, she
has always done her duty in every state of life. If she sat down to
think, she could not hit upon any point in which she has not invariably
behaved like a Christian and a lady (particularly a lady). Yet she is
not exactly Pharisaical; she never enumerates even in her own mind her
manifold excellences, simply because they are so much a matter of course
with her. And that is precisely why she is so perfectly hopeless. She
expects it of herself to do her duty, and behave as a lady should
behave, and she never has the smallest misgiving as to her complete
success in living up to this ideal. That being so, she does not give it
another thought, knowing quite well that, whoever else may do doubtful
or disagreeable things, Constance Whittlemere will move undeviatingly on
in her flawless courses, just as the moon, without any diminution of her
light and serenity, looks down on slums or battle-fields, strewn with
the corpses of the morally or physically slain. And Lady Whittlemere,
like the moon, does not even think of saying, ‘Poor things!’ She is much
too lunar.
At the age of twenty-two (to trace her distressing history) her mother
informed her, at the close of her fourth irreproachable London season,
that she was going to marry Lord Whittlemere. She was very glad to hear
it, for he was completely congenial to her, though, even if she had been
very sorry to hear it, her sense of duty would probably have led her to
do as she was told. But having committed that final act of filial
obedience, she realized that she had a duty to perform to herself in the
person of the new Lady Whittlemere, and climbed up on to a lofty
four-square pedestal of her own. Her duty towards herself was as
imperative as her duty towards Miss Green had been, when she learned the
Diabelli duet in D, and was no doubt derived from the sense of position
that she, as her husband’s wife, enjoyed. Yet perhaps she hardly
‘enjoyed’ it, for it was not in her nature to enjoy anything. She had a
perfectly clear idea, as always, of what her own sense of fitness
entailed on her, and she did it rigidly. ‘The Thing,’ in fact, was her
rule in life. Just as it was The Thing to obey her governess, and obey
her mother, so, when she blossomed out into wifehood, The Thing was to
be a perfect and complete Lady Whittlemere. Success, as always, attended
her conscientious realisation of this. Luckily (or unluckily, since her
hope of salvation was thereby utterly forfeited) she had married a
husband whose general attitude towards life, whose sense of duty and
hidebound instincts, equalled her own, and they lived together, after
that literal solemnization of holy matrimony in St. Peter’s, Eaton
Square, for thirty-four years in unbroken harmony. They both of them had
an unassailable sense of their own dignity, never disagreed on any topic
under the sun, and saw grow up round them a copious family of plain,
solid sons and comely daughters, none of whom caused their parents a
single moment’s salutary anxiety. The three daughters, amply dowried,
got married into stiff mahogany families at an early age, and the sons
continued to prop up the conservative interests of the nation by
becoming severally (i.) a soldier, (ii.) a clergyman, (iii.) a member of
Parliament, (iv.) a diplomatist, and they took into all these liberal
walks of life the traditions and proprieties of genuine Whittlemeres.
They were all Honourables, and all honourable, and all dull, and all
completely conscious of who they were. Nothing could have been nicer.
For these thirty-four years, then, Lady Whittlemere and her husband
lived together in harmony and exquisite expensive pomposity. Had Genesis
been one of the prophetical books, their existence might be considered
as adumbrated by that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Only there
was no serpent of any kind, and their great house in shelter of the
Wiltshire downs had probably a far pleasanter climate than that of
Mesopotamia. Their sons grew up plain but strong, they all got into the
cricket Eleven at Eton, and had no queer cranky leanings towards
vegetarianism like Abel, or to homicide like Cain, while the daughters
until the time of their mahogany marriages grew daily more expert in the
knowledge of how to be Whittlemeres. Three months of the year they spent
in London, three more in their large property in the Highlands of
Scotland, and the remaining six were devoted to Home Life at
Whittlemere, where the hunting season and the shooting season with their
large solid parties ushered in the Old English Christmas, and were
succeeded by the quietness of Lent. Then after Easter the whole
household, from major-domo to steward’s-room boy, went second-class to
London, while for two days Lord and Lady Whittlemere ‘picnicked’ as they
called it at Whittlemere, with only his lordship’s valet and her
ladyship’s maid, and the third and fourth footmen, and the first
kitchen-maid and the still-room maid and one housemaid to supply their
wants, and made their state entry in the train of their establishment to
Whittlemere House, Belgrave Square, where they spent May, June, and
July.
But while they were in the country no distraction consequent on hunting
or shooting parties diverted them from their mission in life, which was
to behave like Whittlemeres. About two hundred and thirty years ago, it
is true, a certain Lord Whittlemere had had ‘passages,’ so to speak,
with a female who was not Lady Whittlemere, but since then the whole
efforts of the family had been devoted to wiping out this deplorable
lapse. Wet or fine, hunting and shooting notwithstanding, Lord
Whittlemere gave audience every Thursday to his estate-manager, who laid
before him accounts and submitted reports. Nothing diverted him from his
duty, any more than it did from distributing the honours of his shooting
lunches among the big farmer-tenants of the neighbourhood. There was a
regular cycle of these, and duly Lord Whittlemere with his guests
lunched (the lunch in its entirety being brought out in hampers from The
House) at Farmer Jones’s, and Farmer Smith’s, and Farmer Robertson’s,
complimented Mrs. Jones, Smith and Robertson on the neatness of their
gardens and the rosy-facedness of their children, and gave them each a
pheasant or a hare. Similarly whatever Highnesses and Duchesses were
staying at The House, Lady Whittlemere went every Wednesday morning to
the Mothers’ Meeting at the Vicarage, and every Thursday afternoon to
pay a call in rotation on three of the lodgekeepers’ and tenants’ wives.
This did not bore her in the least: nothing in the cold shape of duty
ever bored her. Conjointly they went to church on Sunday morning, where
Lord Whittlemere stood up before the service began and prayed into his
hat, subsequently reading the lessons, and giving a sovereign into the
plate, while Lady Whittlemere, after a choir practice on Saturday
afternoon, played the organ. It was the custom for the congregation to
wait in their pews till they had left the church, exactly as if it was
in honour of Lord and Lady Whittlemere that they had assembled here.
This impression was borne out by the fact that as The Family walked down
the aisle the congregation rose to their feet. Only the footman who was
on duty that day preceded their exit, and he held the door of the landau
open until Lady Whittlemere and three daughters had got in. Lord
Whittlemere and such sons as were present then took off their hats to
their wife, mother, sisters and daughters and strode home across the
Park.
And as if this was not enough propriety for one day, every Sunday
evening the vicar of the parish came to dine with the family, directly
after evening service. He was bidden to come straight back from evensong
without dressing, and in order to make him quite comfortable Lord
Whittlemere never dressed on Sunday evening, and made a point of reading
the _Guardian_ and the _Church Family Newspaper_ in the interval between
tea and dinner, so as to be able to initiate Sabbatical subjects. This
fortunate clergyman was permitted to say grace both before and after
meat, and Lord Whittlemere always thanked him for ‘looking in on us.’ To
crown all he invariably sent him two pheasants and a hare during the
month of November and an immense cinnamon turkey at Christmas.
In this way Constance Whittlemere’s married life was just the flower of
her maiden bud. The same sense of duty as had inspired her school-room
days presided like some wooden-eyed Juggernaut over her wifehood, and
all her freedom from any sort of worry or anxiety for these thirty-four
years served but to give her a shell to her soul. She became rounded and
water-tight, she got to be embedded in the jelly of comfort and security
and curtseying lodge-keepers’ wives, and ‘yes-my-lady’-Sunday-Schools.
Such rudiments of humanity as she might possibly have once been
possessed of shrivelled like a devitalised nut-kernel, and, when at the
end of these thirty-four years her husband died, she was already too
proper, too shell-bound to be human any longer. Naturally his death was
an extremely satisfactory sort of death, and there was no sudden stroke,
nor any catching of vulgar disease. He had a bad cold on Saturday, and,
with a rising temperature, insisted on going to church on Sunday. Not
content with that, in the pursuance of perfect duty he went to the
stables, as usual, on Sunday afternoon, and fed his hunters with lumps
of sugar and carrots. It is true that he sent the second footman down to
the church about the time of evensong, to say that he was exceedingly
unwell, and would have to forgo the pleasure of having Mr. Armine to
dinner, but the damage was already done. He developed pneumonia,
lingered a decorous week, and then succumbed. All was extremely proper.
It is idle to pretend that his wife felt any sense of desolation, for
she was impervious to everything except dignity. But she decided to call
herself Constance Lady Whittlemere, rather than adopt the ugly name of
Dowager. There was a magnificent funeral, and she was left very well
off.
_Le Roi est mort: Vive le Roi_: Captain Lord Whittlemere took the reins
of government into his feudal grasp, and his mother with four rows of
pearls for her life, two carriages and a pair of carriage horses and a
jointure of £6000 a year entered into the most characteristic phase of
her existence. She was fifty-six years old, and since she proposed to
live till at least eighty, she bought the lease of a great
chocolate-coloured house in Mayfair with thirty years to run, for it
would be very tiresome to have to turn out at the age of seventy-nine.
As befitted her station, it was very large and gloomy and dignified, and
had five best spare bedrooms, which was just five more than she needed,
since she never asked anybody to stay with her except her children’s
governess, poor Miss Lyall, for whom a dressing-room was far more
suitable: Miss Lyall would certainly be more used to a small room than a
large one. She came originally to help Lady Whittlemere to keep her
promise as set forth in the _Morning Post_ to answer the letters of
condolence that had poured in upon her in her bereavement, but before
that gigantic task was over, Lady Whittlemere had determined to give her
a permanent home here, in other words, to secure for herself someone who
was duly conscious of the greatness of Whittlemeres and would read to
her or talk to her, drive with her, and fetch and carry for her. She did
not propose to give Miss Lyall any remuneration for her services, as is
usual in the case of a companion, for it was surely remuneration enough
to provide her with a comfortable home and all found, while Miss Lyall’s
own property of £100 a year would amply clothe her, and enable her to
lay something by. Lady Whittlemere thought that everybody should lay
something by, even if, like herself, nothing but the total extinction of
the British Empire would deprive her of the certainty of having £6000 a
year as long as she lived. But thrift being a duty, she found that £5000
a year enabled her to procure every comfort and luxury that her limited
imagination could suggest to her, and instead of spending the remaining
£1000 a year on charity or things she did not want, she laid it by. Miss
Lyall, in the same way could be neat and tidy on £50 a year, and lay by
£50 more.
For a year of mourning Constance Whittlemere lived in the greatest
seclusion, and when that year was out she continued to do so. She spent
Christmas at her son’s house, where there was always a pompous family
gathering, and stayed for a fortnight at Easter in a hotel at Hastings
for the sake of sea-breezes. She spent August in Scotland, again with
her son, and September at Buxton, where further to fortify her perfect
health, she drank waters and went for two walks a day with Miss Lyall,
whose hotel bills she, of course, was answerable for. Miss Lyall
similarly accompanied her to Hastings, but was left behind in London at
Christmas and during August.
A large establishment was of course necessary in order to maintain the
Whittlemere tradition. Half-a-dozen times in the season Lady Whittlemere
had a dinner-party which assembled at eight, and broke up with the
utmost punctuality at half-past ten, but otherwise the two ladies were
almost invariably alone at breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner. But a
cook, a kitchen-maid, and a scullery-maid were indispensable to prepare
those meals, a still-room maid to provide cakes and rolls for tea and
breakfast, a butler and two footmen to serve them, a lady’s maid to look
after Lady Whittlemere, a steward’s room boy to wait on the cook, the
butler, and the lady’s maid, two housemaids to dust and tidy, a coachman
to drive Lady Whittlemere, and a groom and a stable-boy to look after
the horses and carriages. It was impossible to do with less, and thus
fourteen lives were spent in maintaining the Whittlemere dignity
downstairs, and Miss Lyall did the same upstairs. With such an
establishment Lady Whittlemere felt that she was enabled to do her duty
to herself, and keep the flag of tradition flying. But the merest tyro
in dignity could see that this could not be done with fewer upholders,
and sometimes Lady Whittlemere had grave doubts whether she ought not to
have a hall-boy as well. One of the footmen or the butler of course
opened the front-door as she went in and out, and the hall-boy with a
quantity of buttons would stand up as she passed him with fixed set
face, and then presumably sit down again.
The hours of the day were mapped out with a regularity borrowed from the
orbits of the stars. At half-past nine precisely Lady Whittlemere
entered the dining-room where Miss Lyall was waiting for her, and
extended to her companion the tips of four cool fingers. Breakfast was
eaten mostly in silence, and if there were any letters for her (there
usually were not) Lady Whittlemere read them, and as soon as breakfast
was over answered them. After these literary labours were accomplished,
Miss Lyall read items from the _Morning Post_ aloud, omitting the
leading articles but going conscientiously through the smaller
paragraphs. Often Lady Whittlemere would stop her. ‘Lady Cammerham is
back in town is she?’ she would say. ‘She was a Miss Pulton, a distant
cousin of my husband’s. Yes, Miss Lyall?’
This reading of the paper lasted till eleven, at which hour, if fine,
the two ladies walked in the Green Park till half-past. If wet, they
looked out of the window to see if it was going to clear. At half-past
eleven the landau was announced (shut if wet, open if fine), and they
drove round and round and round and round the Park till one. At one they
returned and retired till half-past, when the butler and two footmen
gave them lunch. At lunch the butler said, ‘Any orders for the carriage,
my lady?’ and every day Lady Whittlemere said, ‘The victoria at
half-past two. Is there anywhere particular you would like to go, Miss
Lyall?’ Miss Lyall always tried to summon up her courage at this, and
say that she would like to go to the Zoological Gardens. She had done so
once, but that had not been a great success, for Lady Whittlemere had
thought the animals very strange and rude. So since then she always
replied:
‘No, I think not, thank you, Lady Whittlemere.’
They invariably drove for two hours in the summer and for an hour and a
half in the winter, and this change of hours began when Lady Whittlemere
came back from Harrogate at the end of September, and from Hastings
after Easter. Little was said during the drive, it being enough for Lady
Whittlemere to sit very straight up in her seat and look loftily about
her, so that
[Illustration: _The Sea-Green Incorruptible._]
any chance passer-by who knew her by sight would be aware that she was
behaving as befitted Constance Lady Whittlemere. Opposite her, not by
her side, sat poor Miss Lyall, ready with a parasol or a fur boa or a
cape or something in case her patroness felt cold, while on the box
beside Brendon the coachman sat the other footman, who had not been out
round and round and round the Park in the morning, and so in the
afternoon went down Piccadilly and up Regent Street and through Portland
Place and round and round Regent’s Park, and looked on to the back of
the two fat lolloping horses which also had not been out that morning.
There they all went, the horses and Brendon and William and Miss Lyall
in attendance on Constance Lady Whittlemere, as dreary and pompous and
expensive and joyless a carriage-load as could be seen in all London,
with the exception, possibly, of Black Maria.
They returned home in time for Miss Lyall to skim through the evening
paper aloud, and then had the tea with the cakes and the scones from the
still-room. After tea Miss Lyall read for two hours some book from the
circulating library, while Lady Whittlemere did wool work. These gloomy
tapestries were made into screens and chair-seats and cushions, and
annually one (the one begun in the middle of November) was solemnly
presented to Miss Lyall on the day that Lady Whittlemere went out of
town for Christmas. And annually she said:
“Oh, thank you, Lady Whittlemere; is it really for me?”
It was: and she was permitted to have it mounted as she chose at her own
expense.
At 7.15 P.M. a sonorous gong echoed through the house; Miss Lyall
finished the sentence she was reading, and Lady Whittlemere put her
needle into her work, and said it was time to dress. At dinner, though
both were teetotallers, wine was offered them by the butler, and they
both refused it, and course after course was presented to them by the
two footmen in white stockings and Whittlemere livery and cotton gloves.
Port also was put on the table with dessert, this being the bottle which
had been opened at the last dinner-party, and when Lady Whittlemere had
eaten a gingerbread and drunk half a glass of water they went, not into
the morning-room which they had used during the day, but the large
drawing-room upstairs with the Louis Seize furniture and the cut-glass
chandeliers. Every evening it was all ablaze with lights, and the fire
roared up the chimney: the tables were bright with flowers, and rows of
chairs were set against the wall. Majestically Lady Whittlemere marches
into it, followed by Miss Lyall, and there she plays patience till 10.30
while Miss Lyall looks on with sycophantic congratulations at her
success, and murmured sympathy if the cards are unkind. At 10.30
Branksome the butler throws open the door and a footman brings in a tray
of lemonade and biscuits. This refreshment is invariably refused by both
ladies, and at eleven the house is dark.
Now the foregoing catalogue of events accurately describes Lady
Whittlemere’s day, and in it is comprised the sum of the material that
makes up her mental life. But it is all enacted in front of the
background that she is Lady Whittlemere. The sight of the London
streets, with their million comedies and tragedies, arouses in her no
sympathetic or human current: all she knows is that Lady Whittlemere is
driving down Piccadilly. When the almond blossom comes out in Regent’s
Park, and the grass is yellow with the flowering of the spring bulbs,
her heart never dances with the daffodils; all that happens is that Lady
Whittlemere sees that they are there. She subscribes to no charities,
for she is aware that her husband left her this ample jointure for
herself, and she spends such part of it as she does not save on herself,
on her food and her house and her horses and the fifteen people whose
business it is to make her quite comfortable. She has no regrets and no
longings, because she has always lived perfectly correctly, and does not
want anything. She is totally without friends or enemies, and she is
never surprised nor enthusiastic nor vexed. About six times a year, on
the day preceding one of her dinners, Miss Lyall does not read aloud
after tea, but puts the names of her guests on pieces of cardboard, and
makes a map of the table, while the evening she leaves London for
Hastings or Scotland she stops playing patience at ten, in order to get
a good long night before her journey. She does the same on her arrival
in town again so as to get a good long night after her journey. She
takes no interest in politics, music, drama, or pictures, but goes to
the private view of the Academy as May comes round, because The Thing
recommends it. And when she comes to die, the life-long consciousness of
The Thing will enable her to meet the King of Terrors with fortitude and
composure. He will not frighten her at all.
And what on earth will the Recording Angel find to write in his book
about her? He cannot put down all those drives round the Park, and all
those games of patience, and really there is nothing else to say....
CHAPTER SIX
THE ETERNALLY UNCOMPROMISED
Winifred Ames was the youngest of a family of six girls, none of whom an
industrious mother had managed to foist on to incautious husbands. They
were all plain and square and strong (like carpets of extra width), and
when seated at the family table in Warwick Square with their large firm
mother at one end and a mild diminutive father at the other, resembled a
Non-Commissioned Officers’ mess. But Winifred was an anomaly, a freak in
this array of stalwart maidenhood: there was something pretty about her,
and, no less marked a difference between her and her sisters, something
distinctly silly about her. Florence and Mary and Diana and Jane and
Queenie were all silent and swarthy and sensible, Winifred alone in this
barrack of a house represented the lighter side of life. A secret
sympathy perhaps existed between her and her father, but they had little
opportunity to conspire, for he was packed off to the City immediately
after breakfast, and on his return given his dinner, and subsequently a
pack of cards to play patience with.