town by storm, in virtue of her authentic and audacious vitality. She
had the face of a Sir Joshua Reynolds angel, the figure of a Botticelli
one, the tongue of a _gamin_, and the spirits of an everlasting
carnival. Her laugh, the very sound of that delicious enjoyment, set the
drawing-room in a roar, and her conversation the smoking-room, where
she was quite at home--there was never anyone so complete as she, never
such an apple of attractiveness, of which all could have a slice. She
would ride in the Row of a morning, call the policeman, who wanted to
take her name on the score of excessive velocity, ‘Arthur dear,’ and
remind him how she had danced in the cause of police old-age pensions at
Clerkenwell (which was perfectly true), thus melting his austere heart.
Then, as like as not, she would get off her horse at the far end of the
ladies’ mile, and put on it an exhausted governess, with orders to the
groom to see her safe home to Bayswater. Then she would sit on the rail,
ask a passer-by for a cigarette, and hold a little court of adorers,
male and female alike, until her horse came back again. She would, in
rare intervals of fatigue, go to bed about four o’clock in the morning,
when her mother was giving a ball in Prince’s Gate, and stand on the
balcony outside her bedroom in her nightgown, and talk to the remaining
guests as they left the house, shrieking good wishes, and blowing
kisses. Or if the fit so took her, instead of going to bed she would
change her ball-dress for a riding-habit, go down to the mews with
Charlie or Tommy or Harry, or indeed with Bertha or Florrie or Madge
(fitting these latter up with other habits) and start for a ride in the
break of the summer morning, returning hungry and dewy to breakfast.
Wherever she went the world laughed with her; she enhaloed all she shone
upon. Chiefly did she shine upon Charlie Gordon, who, in the measure of
a man, was a like comet to herself. He was some five years older than
she, and they expected to marry each other when the fun became less fast
and furious. In the interval, among other things, they had a
swimming-race across the Serpentine one early August morning, and she
won by two lengths. An angry Humane Society boat jabbed at them with
hooks in order to rescue them. These they evaded.
Those whom Nature threatens with grizzly kittenhood live too much on the
surface to be able to spare much energy for such engrossing habits as
falling in love, and when, at the age of twenty-five she suddenly
determined to marry the small and silent Mr. Begum, nobody was surprised
and many applauded. She could not go on swimming the Serpentine with
Charlie Gordon, and it seemed equally unimaginable that she should marry
a man with only £2000 a year and no prospects of any sort or kind. She
did not imperatively want him, any more than he imperatively wanted
her, and since that one conclusive reason for matrimony was absent, it
did not particularly matter whom she married, so long as he was
immensely wealthy, and of an indulgent temper. By nationality, Mr. Begum
owed about equal debts to Palestine, Poland, and the Barbados, and since
at this epoch, Palestine at any rate was in the ascendant over the roofs
of Mayfair it was thought highly suitable that Baby Armstrong should
become Baby Begum. She had always called Charlie Gordon, ‘dear,’ or
‘darling,’ or ‘fool,’ and she explained it all to him in the most
illuminating manner.
‘Darling, you quite understand, don’t you?’ she said, as she rode beside
him one morning in the Park. ‘Jehoshaphat’s a perfect dear, and he suits
me. Life isn’t all beer and skittles, otherwise I would buy some beer,
and you would save up to get a second-hand skittle alley, and there we
should be! My dear, do look at that thing on the chestnut coming down
this way. Is it a goat or isn’t it? I think it’s a goat. Oh don’t be a
fool, dear, you needn’t be a fool. Of course everybody thought we were
going to marry each other, but what can matter less than what everybody
thinks? And besides, I know quite well that you haven’t the slightest
intention of getting broken-hearted about me, and the only thing you
mind about it is that I have shown I have not got a broken heart about
you. What really is of importance is what I am to call Jehoshaphat. I
can’t call him Jehu, because he doesn’t do anythink furiously, and I
can’t call him “Fat,” because he’s thin, and there’s nothing left!’
‘I should call him “darling,” then,’ said Charlie, who was still
unconvinced by this flagrant philosophy, ‘same as you call me.’
She looked at him almost regretfully.
‘Oh, do be sensible,’ she said. ‘I know I’m right: I feel I’m right. Get
another girl. There are lots of them, you know.’
Charlie had the most admirable temper.
‘I’ll take your advice,’ he said. ‘And, anyhow, I wish you the best of
luck. I hope you’ll be rippingly happy. Come on, let’s have a gallop.’
Since then, years, as impatient novelists so often inform us, passed.
Babs’s philosophy of life was excellent as far as it went, and the only
objection to it was that it did not go far enough. In spite of his
vitality, Charlie did not, as a sensible young man should, see about
getting another girl; for perhaps he was wounded a little deeper than
either he or Babs knew. The tragedy about it all is that they both had
the constitution of grizzly
[Illustration: _The Grizzly Kittens._]
kittens. He did not marry any one else, nor did he live into his age as
that slowly increased upon him, and Mr. Begum got asthma. This made him
very tiresome and wheezy, and the perpetual contact with senility
probably prevented Babs from growing into her proper mould of increasing
years. Her sense of youth was constantly fed by her husband’s venerable
habits; with him she always felt a girl. And the ruthless decades
proceeded in their Juggernaut march, without her ever seeing the
toppling car that now overhangs her, stiff with the wooden images of
age. Wooden, at any rate, they will seem to her when she fully perceives
them, and robbed of the graciousness and wisdom that might have clothed
and softened them if only she had admitted their advent.
As it is, two pathetic figures confront us. Charlie Gordon, that slim
entrancing youth, is just as slim (in fact slimmer in the wrong places)
as he ever was. But he is a shade less entrancing, with his mincing
entry into the assembling party than he was twenty-five years ago. There
was no need for him to mince then, for his eager footsteps carried him,
as with Hermes-heels, on the wings of youth. Now he takes little quick
steps, and thinks it is the same thing. He is just as light and spry as
ever (except when he is troubled with lumbago) but he cannot see that it
is not the same thing. He has not noticed that his lean youthful jaw has
a queer little fold in the side of it, and if he notices it, he thinks
it is a dimple. He brushes his hair very carefully now, not knowing that
to the disinterested observer the top of his head looks rather like
music-paper, with white gaps in between the lines, and that it is quite
obvious that he grows those thinning locks very long on one side of his
head (just above the ear) and trains them in the manner of an espaliered
pear over the denuded bone where once a plume used jauntily to erect
itself. He is careful about them now, but once, not so very long ago, he
forgot how delicately trained were those tresses, and went down to bathe
with the other boys of the house. They naturally came detached from
their proper place, and streamed after him as he swam, like the locks of
a Rhine-maiden. It was rather terrible. But such as they are, they are
still glossy raven black: there is not the smallest hint of grey
anywhere about them.
Again, once in days of old he had quick staccato little movements of his
head, like some young wild animal, which suited the swiftness of his
mercurial gambollings very well; to this day that particular habit has
persisted, but the effect of it somehow is dismally changed; it is
galvanic and vaguely suggests St. Vitus’s abominable dance. He still
jumps about with joy when he is pleased, but those skippings resemble
rather the antics of a marionette than coltish friskings. He feels
young, at least he has that quenchless appetite for pleasure that is
characteristic of the young, but he isn’t young, and his tragedy, the
rôle of the grizzly kitten, stares him in the face. Perhaps he will
never perceive it himself, and go on as usual, slightly less agile owing
to the increasing stiffness of his venerable joints, until the days of
his sojourning here are ended. Or perhaps he will see it, and after a
rather depressing week or two turn into a perfectly charming old man
with a bald head and spectacles and a jolly laugh.
Mrs. Begum’s fate hangs in the balance also. She has begun to think it
rather daring of her to go larking about with a boy who is easily young
enough to be her son, whereas in the days when such manœuvres were
rather daring she never gave two thoughts to them. She still likes (or
pretends to like) sitting up to the end of a ball, not in the least
realizing how appalling a spectacle she presents in the light of a June
dawn. She can easily be persuaded to tuck up her skirts and dance the
tango or the fox-trot or whatever it is that engages the attention of
the next generation, and if she wants to sit down, she is as likely as
not to flop cross-legged on the floor, or to perch herself on a friend’s
knee, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne cup in the
other, and tell slightly risky stories, such as amused the partners of
her youth. But for all her wavings of her wand, the spell does not work
nowadays, and when poor Babs begins to be naughty, it is kinder of her
friends to go away. Kitten-like she jumps at the blind-tassel still, but
it is weary, heavy work, and she creaks, she creaks....
But the most degrading exhibition of all is when Babs and Charlie get
together. Then in order to show, each to each, that time writes no
wrinkles on their azure brows, they give a miserable display of mature
skittishness. They see which of them can scream loudest, laugh most, eat
most, drink most, romp most, and, in a word, be grizzliest. Their manner
of speech has not changed in the smallest degree in the lapse of thirty
years, and to the young people about it sounds like some strange and
outlandish tongue such as was current in the reign of the second
George. They are always betraying themselves, too, by whistling ‘Two
Lovely Black Eyes’ or some ditty belonging to the dark ages, and to
correct themselves pretend that their mother taught it them when she
came to kiss them good-night in their cribs. They do not deceive anybody
else by their jumpings, they do not deceive each other, and perhaps they
do not deceive themselves. But it is as if a curse was on them: they
have got to be dewy and Maylike: if Charlie wants a book from the far
end of the room he runs to get it; when they go into dinner together
they probably slide along the parquet floor. He is a little deaf, and
pretending to hear all that is said, makes the most idiotic replies; and
she is a little blind, and cannot possibly read the papers without
spectacles, which she altogether refuses to wear. If only they had
married each other thirty years ago they would probably have mellowed a
little, or at least could have told each other how ridiculous they were
being. As it is, they both have to screw themselves up to the key of the
time when they swam the Serpentine together. Poor dear old frauds, why
do they try to wrench themselves up to concert pitch still? Such a
concert pitch! such strainings and bat-like squeaks! It would be so much
better to get a little flat and fluffy, on the grounds of greater
comfort to themselves, not to mention motives of humanity to others.
For, indeed, they are rather a ghastly sight, dabbing and squawking at
each other on the sofa, in memory of days long ago. The young folk only
wonder who those ‘funny old buffers’ are, and they wonder even more when
the funny old buffers insist on joining in a game of fives on the
billiard-table, and the room resounds with bony noises as their hands
hit the flying ball. But they scream in earnest then, because it does
really hurt them very much. And then Mr. Begum gets wheeled in in his
invalid chair with his rugs and his foot-warmers, and insists on talking
to Charlie Gordon when the game is over (and his hands feel as if they
had been bastinadoed), as if he was really an elderly man, and can
remember the Franco-German war, which of course he can. But Charlie,
though he stoutly denies the imputation, feels very uncomfortable, and
changes the subject at the earliest opportunity. By this time Babs will
have organized a game of rounders or something violent in the garden, in
order to show that she is young too. She is getting very nut-crackery,
and looks tired and haggard, as indeed she is. But she shouts to her
husband, who is much deafer than Charlie, ‘Daddy, darling, we’re going
to play rounders! Would you like to come out, or do you think it will be
rather cold for you? Perhaps you’d be wiser not to. You won’t play, I
suppose, Charlie?’
And Charlie, nursing his bruised hands, says, ‘Rounders? Bless me, yes.
I’m not quite past rounders yet. Nothing like a good run-about game to
keep you fit.’
It keeps him so fit that he is compelled to have a good stiff brandy and
soda afterwards, to tone him up for the exertion of having dinner.
Wearily, aching in every limb, they creep into their respective beds.
There seems to be a pillow-fight going on somewhere at the end of the
passage, with really young voices shrieking, and the swift pad of light
feet. Babs thinks of joining it, but her fingers fall from the pillow
she had caught up, and she gets into bed instead, thinking she will be
up to anything after a good night. And she would be up to anything that
could decently be required of her, if only she would not present her
grim and dauntless figure at such excursions. Already Charlie is
dropping into a sleep of utter prostration: he wants to be in good trim
to-morrow. There he lies with his thin Rhine-maiden hair reposing on his
pillow. But he wakes easily, though slightly deaf, and at the first
rattle of his door-handle when his valet calls him next morning he will
instinctively gather it up over his poor bald pate.
And they might both be so comfortable and jolly and suitable. There is a
wounding pathos about them both.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CLIMBERS:
I. THE HORIZONTAL
The most casual observer of the beauties and uglinesses of Nature will
have observed that in the anatomy of that very common object, a Tree,
there are two widely different classes of branches. The one class grows
more or less straight out from the trunk and after a horizontal career
droops somewhat at the extremities, the other grows upwards in a
persevering and uniform ascent. Such branches when springing high up on
the trunk of the tree form the very top of the tree.
But though these facts are patent in vegetable life, and though it is
clear that anybody not idiotic and sufficiently active can climb more or
less successfully up a tree going higher and higher, and selecting for
his ascent the branches that aspire, and not making a precarious way
along the other class of branch which at the best is horizontal, and at
the worst droops downwards, it seems there must be greater difficulties
in the ascension of what is known among climbers as the Tree of Society.
For while you may see some of them climbing steadily higher, and ever
mounting till their electro-plated forms are lost amid the gold of the
topmost foliage, and their joyful monkey-cries mingle and almost are
entuned with the song of the native birds who naturally make their nest
there, you will see other climbers--the majority in fact--eagerly
scrambling for ever along perfectly horizontal boughs that never bring
them any higher up at all, and eventually, depressed by their weight,
but bend earthwards again. Unlike the happier apes who have a _flair_
for altitude and bird-song, these less fortunate sisters have only a
_flair_ for clinging and proceeding.
There are of course specimens of these Trees of Society in every town in
England, and specimens of the monkeys who hop about them. But those are
but small trees and the climbers small apes, and the climbing of these
shrubs appears to present but moderate difficulties. The great specimen,
the one glorious and perfect human vegetable which grows in England,
flourishes only in the centre of London; its roots draw their nutriment
from the soil of Middlesex (not of Surrey), and its top, resonant with
birds, soars high into the ample ether of Mayfair. It is a regular
monkey-puzzle, and swarms with industrious climbers going in every
direction, most of them, unfortunately, proceeding with infinite toil
along horizontal branches, while others slowly or swiftly make their
way upwards. Occasionally, with shrill screams and impotent clutchings
at the trunk, one falls, and the higher the fall, the more completely
dead will he (or she, particularly she) be when he reaches the ground.
She may lie, faintly twitching for a minute or two, while grimacing
faces of friends peer down at her, but even before her twitchings have
ceased they have turned to their businesses again, for no climber ever
has a moment’s rest, and a few ghouls crawl out from the bushes and bear
away the corpse for interment wrapped up in a winding sheet of the less
respectable journals of the day.... Let us study the unnatural history
of these curious brightly-coloured creatures a little more in detail.
Dismissing the metaphor of the trees, we may say that at one time or
another these climbers have come to London, like Dick Whittington.
Possibly they may always have lived in London, taking London as a mere
geographical expression, but London, considered as a spiritual (or
unspiritual) entity, has at one time or other in their lives dawned upon
them as a shining and desirable thing, and they have said to themselves,
gazing upwards, ‘I want; I want.’ They have probably had more than the
proverbial halfcrown in their pockets, for climbing is an expensive
job, with all the provisions and guides and ropes and axes necessary for
its accomplishment, and half-a-crown would not go very far. Unlike Dick
Whittington, however, they have not brought their cat along with them,
but they get their cat, so to speak, when they begin to climb. In other
words, without metaphor, they hook on to somebody, a pianist, or a
duchess, or a buffoon, or an artist, or a cabinet-minister, or something
striking of some kind, and firmly clutch it. Eminence of any sort,
whether of birth or of achievement, is naturally a useful aid in
ascensions, while on the other hand the climber’s half-crowns, or her
flattery, or her dinners, or her country-house, perhaps even the climber
herself, holds attractions for the particular piece of eminence she has
put the hook into. It is her mascot, her latch-key, her passport--what
you will--and she is wise to cling on to it for dear life. The mascot
may not like it at first, he may wriggle and struggle, but on no account
should she let go. Probably he gets accustomed to it quite soon, and
does not mind being her electric light which she turns on when she
chooses, and, incidentally, pays for quite honestly. The two begin, in a
way, to run each other, in most cases without scandal or any cause for
scandal, and, mutually sustained, soar upwards together. By means of her
mascot she attracts his friends to her house, so that he knows that
whenever he goes there he will find congenial spirits and an excellent
dinner, while she, if she is clever (and no climbers, whether
horizontals or perpendiculars, are without wits), finds herself gently
wafted upwards.
She will probably have begun her climb up the first few feet of the
branchless trunk with the aid of ladders, friends and acquaintances
(chiefly acquaintances) who have introduced her to one or two desirable
folk, her mascot among them, and have enabled her to lay her slim
prehensile hand on the lowest branches. At this point, having now a firm
hold, so it seems to her, she will often kick her ladders down, perhaps
not really intending to kick them, but in her spring upwards doing so
almost accidentally. But if she does, she commits a great stupidity, and
it is almost safe to bet that she will prove a horizontal. For it may
easily prove that she will need those same ladders again a little higher
up the trunk where there is a hiatus in branches, and returning for them
will find them no longer there. They will not be lying prone on the
ground as she probably thought (if she gave another thought to them at
all), but they will be somewhere the other side of the tree, out of
reach. She has to coax them back, and it is possible they will not come
for her coaxing. And while she is pondering she may loose hold of her
mascot, who will scramble away. In that case, she had better jump down
at once, and begin (slightly soiled) all over again.
To take a concrete instance, after this general introduction (as if,
after reading a book about some curious and interesting animal we went
to the Zoological Gardens to observe its appearance and habits), Mrs.
Howard Britten furnishes a good example of the horizontal variety. Where
the ‘Howard’ came from nobody knew or cared; she just took it, and since
no one else wanted it, nothing was said. She had married a genial
solicitor, who from contact with the dusky secrets of the great, had
acquired a liking for their sunlight, and did not in the least object to
being put in his wife’s knapsack. He made a very large income in his
profession, and found that, though household expenses began to mount
even quicker than his wife, the house in Brompton Square became
considerably more amusing when the climbing began. He took no active
part in it, but merely popped his head out of the knapsack
[Illustration: Climbers: I: The Horizontal.]
and contentedly admired the enlarged view. Nor was he the least
surprised when at the end of this particular season, his Molly persuaded
him to move Mayfairwards, and purchase (the fact that it was a great
bargain made little persuasion necessary) a house in Brook Street with a
ball-room.
Molly Howard-Britten (the hyphen appeared this summer) had chosen for
her mascot a Member of Parliament who had lately entered the Ark of the
Cabinet, and was uncomfortable at home because his wife had an
outrageous stammer and an inordinate passion for wool-work. Mr.
Harbinger was of course a Conservative, for to the climber that
notorious body, the House of Lords, constitutes a considerable
proportion of the top of the tree, and the House of Lords is generally
supposed to be of the Tory creed. It was safer, therefore, as she looked
forward to a good deal of their society, to have a Conservative mascot.
She on her side offered a quick feminine wit to amuse him, a charming
face and manner, and really admirable food. Mrs. Harbinger came once or
twice, bringing her skeins with her, but since she disliked
dinner-parties as much as she adored worsted, it soon became common for
her husband to dine with the Howard-Brittens alone. The Howard-Brittens
spent a week-end with the Harbingers, and there Molly easily secured
three or four of his friends to dine with her on the following Friday
week. On this occasion one of them was going on to a very sumptuous
tree-top ball afterwards, and during dinner she was rung up by the
hostess who, agitated by the extreme inclemency of the night, begged her
to bring a guest or two more along with her. This was luck: Molly went,
and being a remarkably good dancer spent an evening that proved both
agreeable and profitable. By the end of the season she had got well
placed among the lower branches of the tree, and, perhaps a shade too
soon, since it is not quite so easy to be a hostess as might be
supposed, took the Brook Street house with the ball-room.
She spent a rather sleepless August with her husband at Marienbad, and
began to make her first mistakes. She gave picnics, and being in too
great a hurry to secure a crowd, secured the crowd, but unfortunately it
was the wrong one. She asked every one to come and see her when they got
back to England, but those who came were not for the most part the
singers in the top branches, but climbers like herself. This fact
vaguely dawned on her, and she determined to rectify it when, with the
assembling of Parliament in November, her mascot would be in town
again. She did rectify it, and in the rectification made things much
worse, for she gently dropped all the people she did not want, and made
herself a quantity of enemies, not interesting, splendid enemies, whose
attention it was an honour to attract, even though that attention wore a
hostile aspect, but tiresome, stupid little enemies. Then a stroke of
ill-luck, which was not at all her fault, befell her, for in January
there was a general election, the Conservatives were turned out, and
worse than that, Mr. Harbinger lost his seat. Her attempt to make her
house a rallying-spot for the vanquished party signally failed.
Then she made her second mistake. Politics having proved a broken reed,
she adopted the dangerous device of pretending to be extremely intimate
with her mascot, alluding to him as ‘Bertie,’ and if the telephone bell
rang excusing herself by saying that she must see what Bertie wanted.
Had people believed in the intimacy of this relation, one of two things
might have happened: she might either have made herself an object of
interest, or (here was the danger), she might have had a fall. She had
not at present climbed very high, so she would not have hurt herself
fatally, but neither of these things happened. Nobody cared, any more
than they cared about her having added Howard and the hyphen to her
name. Thus an unprofitable spring passed, and, as a matter of fact, she
was beginning to climb out along a horizontal branch.